About

Our Mission Statement

uTimes is dedicated to providing independent news of quality, for the Utopian community in a positive environment for both staff and users. We will provide regular interesting and varied content ranging from war articles to interviews and special features. By recruiting from a broad spectrum of Utopian Backgrounds and targetting a wider utopian audience we hope to have a high reporting standard, reduced bias and welcome players who have not previously frequented community sites and encourage users to submit content of their own via our guest writer program.

Disclaimer
All opinions expressed on uTimes by the writers are strictly expressed by the staff alone, and remain the sole responsibility of the individual authors of each post; they are not representative of any third party, except where otherwise attributed and they certainly are not meant to reflect the views of uTimes proper.

Unless explicitly indicated, the authors neither endorse nor take responsibility for any information or opinion expressed by any third party in any comments, trackbacks or links external to this website.

Background
This project was started by a number of interested utopians - inclusive of one of our longstanding Executives Clarey - who wanted to write or be involved with a creative project. An IRC channel was created, and through friends and contacts, more like minded people were recruited. Various proposals and policies were drawn up, amended and scrapped until a vision was formed, that all involved staff supported.

It was agreed upon as a whole that we needed a fresh start, learning from the mistakes of past frameworks and with an emphasis on independence, bias reduction, quality and regularity of news without any previous stigmas attached. With the use of their hosting, we embarked on a partnership with DragonPortal, agreeing to let them stick to what they excel at - tools creation and tools hosting while we focus on news and other articles.

The next step in the evolution of our project was to create an organizational structure. We opted to have an Executive Board that would guide the management of the uTimes.org project and have final say in Issue resolution and conflict management. In order to prevent a situation where a minority would have too much dominion over the site, we opted to have an uneven number of five Executive Directors. Elected from the staff who had played the most active roles in the eventual foundation of the uTimes site were three ladies and two males: Alexstrasza, Clarey, LightNing, Peppie and Stella. Currently the executive board is made up of Versace, TheRock, Crad, Clarey and Stella. Our long term goal is that reporters and editors will eventually have just as much say in the day to day running in the site operations and that all staff members contribute equally to the direction the site takes in future.

The site was set to be launched on the 6th of December 2008, and with this deadline in mind, it was easier to finalize our policies and start working on content. Plenty of time and effort was spent finalizing Mission Statements, Internal policies, the Moderation policy and the Reporting and Editorial standards we plan to uphold. Forums were incorporated into the site, we decided on our content and how best to publish. More staff signed up to be part of this project, and we evolved some nifty ideas including RSS feeds that would be published on irc via our bots and a fantastic opportunity provided by our partner site to have one top news story placed on the login page of all Metatron users.

We decided to cover a range of topics, so as to cater to a range of interests and have something for everyone. It is important to us, that everyone feels like this is a site for them. That means we will cover news from the top to the bottom of the server. Not everyone plays in the Top 10 kingdoms or in one of the top alliances, so we will not be limiting ourselves to solely covering those, since to do so would make the site inaccessible or irrelevant for a large portion of the utopian community. Flame if you wish, we can take it. As the providers of news we will be deciding on what is newsworthy, and not only cater to an elitist minority. That said, it is not just News we plan on featuring. As well as coverage of Alliance happenings and kingdom wars, we will have special features ranging from historical utopia, real life stories and much much more! In addition we have a cartoon section and utopian horoscopes

So as you can see, a lot of work and thought has been put into this site. In terms of its look and features, we have gone for a clean, journalistic style over cluttered and cheap parlour tricks. We are however always open to suggestions and feedback and will continue to add and amend things as time passes and issues/ideas arise.

If you wish to request news coverage or apply for any staff or guest writing positions, feel free to contact us on #uTimes at irc.utonet.org or in site via private message to one of our execs.

The uTimes site is run by its own staff and guided by an elected Executive Board and is working in partnership with http://thedragonportal.net/