East Valley Tribune Web Site Back in Action Spotty After Sunday's Domain Name Foul-Up

The East Valley Tribune web site displayed local news and advertisements again after about 12 hours of near-dormancy on Sunday due to a domain name screw-up. Evidence points to the explanation that someone at the Tribune or Freedom Communications, the Trib's parent company, forgot to renew the eastvalleytribune.com domain name...

By Ray Stern

April 20, 2009

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The East Valley Tribune web site displayed local news and advertisements again after about 12 hours of near-dormancy on Sunday due to a domain name screw-up.

Evidence points to the explanation that someone at the Tribune or Freedom Communications, the Trib's parent company, forgot to renew the eastvalleytribune.com domain name before it expired on Saturday. In other words, a major "whoops."

As we reported yesterday morning, the apparent mistake caused the Trib's Web site to become unhooked from its domain name, so that computer users could not access it.

The news site did not pop back up straight away after the Trib renewed the domain name early Sunday morning. Technical problems in re-pointing the domain name continued throughout the day as workers got the site up in the afternoon, only to have it come down again until the evening. When we checked the site just after 8 p.m., it was still displaying the "site of a future home page" message.

The Trib's site doesn't refer to technical errors or any other kind of answer for the missing Web coverage on Sunday. We left a message this morning with Trib publisher Julie Moreno and we'll let you know if she calls back.

UPDATE: 3:08 p.m.:

Ouch.

But at least they won the Pulitzer.

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Ray Stern is the former news editor of Phoenix New Times. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Arizona for more than two decades. He's won numerous awards for his reporting, including the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for Investigative Journalism.