Special thanks to all who participated, artists and voters alike.

We’re super excited with the new logo designed by @RigaroniB. Many have commented on how awesome it is.

Once it was selected, we had to choose a color, red, blue or black. Of course, everyone seems to like blue. But we didn’t want to theme it with Steemit (hey, that rhymed!). Red is nice because it stands out and makes a nice statement. But the consensus was to go with black.

So, here it is!!

Wow! Right?

We had these to choose from in the original contest. The two honorable mentions were late entries.

Special thanks to the artists:

@KrNel, @yadamaniart, @RigaroniB & @cebymaster each had successful entries (@son-of-satire & @steemvest17 came in late - honorable mention). Please offer your support for their outstanding entries and contribution to Steemit.

We relied heavily on votes to help us determine the top candidates. The top three stood above the rest in votes, so we simply went with them. It made our job easier. After all, that’s the point of the voter based contest anyway, right? Still, we wrestled with whether to go with 3 or 6 for the final round.

@KrNel had the most votes, but had all his entries in one reply. This made it tough to decide. However, @full-steem-ahead mentioned really liking the black background, so we ran with that one from his entries.

The one right behind was @RigaroniB’s entry, which ended up winning.

Next was another @RigaroniB entry.

Behind this one was a tie, followed by another tie. So, we could go with the top 3, top 5 or top 7. We opted to make things easier and go with the top 3, seen above.

Each on-time contestant received 50 TRAIL. The winner, @RigoroniB, received 200 Steem and 500 TRAIL for his work.

Here’s proof of the Steem payment.

Branding Underway

All formats have been delivered and branding is underway. You can see it here in our avatar and on the @STEEMNEWS.ONLINE blog as well as on our Facebook & Twitter pages.

You may have seen us becoming more visible the last few days, promoting news articles and commenting. Each promoted article is published to our social sites as well as resteemed and upvoted. Each author receives one TRAIL coin for their contribution, in addition to whatever boost we can give their payout. Most promoted articles get upvoted by SteemTrail as well.

What We’ve Done So Far

Over the past few weeks, since our introduction post just over four weeks ago, we’ve combed through the #news tag, in addition to the #steemnews tag, each day in search of great content. During that time we’ve resteemed at least 66 articles and upvoted many more. The SteemTrail account has upvoted most of those, adding more support and additional payout for the authors.

• We’ve established some of our social sites, as mentioned above.
• Set up a trail on Streemian.
• Distributed TRAIL to authors whose articles we’ve promoted.
• Built a website that still needs lots of work. :)
• Encouraged several authors and built what we expect to be some great long-term relationships.

What’s Next?

We do have a roadmap laid out, that becomes ever more ambitious as we are able to overcome hurdles. Most of those hurdles are technological, but many also simply include participation.

Formatted Updates

We’re working on ideas for this, but nothing has really come together yet. A running list works, but can be viewed on our blog page anyway. Perhaps just weekly updates of promoted content and where we are in regard to our goals? If you have any ideas of what would be helpful, let us know.

Website

One of our goals is to get a website dialed in that will promote all the STEEMNEWS.ONLINE curated content. This is proving easier said than done.

@krnel has been striving to help us with some of the technical issues we’re facing, mainly in regard to formatting. We can import the articles just fine. And the headings and most content code is converting nicely. But images! Ugh, the images just aren’t working out.

If an author uses html, they seem to work great. But if they use nothing (which is what most do) or the ‘<div’ or ‘<center’ commands, our tools just don’t get it. The images won’t display at all.

We have a lot more functionality we want to bring to the site, but until the images are displaying correctly, we can’t even begin to promote it. So, for the moment, that’s our biggest challenge.

Tech Skills

There are a couple of challenges here. The first, of course, is that our current team doesn’t really have the tech skills to pull off everything we’d like to do. We have @KrNel striving to get some of the bugs worked out and make the site function better. The hard working @instructor2121 is promoting the site and continues to help with its development as he’s able. And @anotherjoe works on content and basic layout, as well as curation and networking.

The second is that we’re all juggling a lot of responsibility with TRAIL and SteemTrail. We just can’t take the time to learn to do all that we’d like to do with the site.

If you are good at backend work, and especially if you have some understanding of the blockchain, we’d love to talk to you about getting involved. You can look us up on the SteemTrail Discord server. We’d also like to get some front-end design expertise involved. We can basically make things work, but a good FE guru would really help push this project, as well as others we’re planning to launch.

Other Challenges

Articles… There are many good tech and science news articles being posted each day. In fact, if someone is interested, a science/tech trail could use some curation. We promote a lot of these, but are striving to keep from becoming a tech site.

While there is some worldnews promoted on Steemit, it’s usually just a newslink or opinion piece, rarely really being journalistic. There’s nothing wrong with those, but they’re not the type of content we’re looking for.

That being said, there are some bright spots. And a few folks have risen up to the task to provide some excellent insights.

Bright Spots!

Among the bright spots we’ve been encouraged by:

• We’ve seen an increase in the use of the #steemnews tag. Of course, using it doesn’t mean that your article will get promoted. But, it does put your article ahead of others for consideration. And we’ve had a couple of outstanding pieces come through that tag in the last couple of days.
• Of course, the logo! And the launch of our social pages has helped us move along.
• Encouragement from many in the community as we’ve become more visible in promoting articles. For a while, we just did so quietly, upvoting and sharing. With the launch of the logo and the ability to brand more clearly, we’ve become more visible.

What You Can Do

For those that want to become more involved, or just want to help promote excellent journalism on Steemit, there are several things you can do to help.

• Of course, follow @STEEMNEWS.ONLINE on Steemit.
• Also follow us on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/STEEMNEWSONLINE-1602795696695851) & [Twitter](https://twitter.com/STEEMNEWSONLINE)
• Resteem our promoted content here, as well as share on Facebook and Twitter (and any other site you’re a part of ).
• Write excellent journalistic articles. When you do, include the #steemnews tag.
• We can use more help in curation. Along with several other trails in SteemTrail, the #news-trail can use more involvement. There is also room for someone to take on more oversight of STEEMNEWS.ONLINE, if they’re interested. This would provide for the other team members to turn more of their focus to other SteemTrail projects.
• Follow the steemnews.online curation trail on Streemian. Following the SteemTrail operator on Streemian will help us as well.
• Contact us and tell us what you think would help provide a better online news source, promoting Steemit authors.

Your editors,

STEEMNEWS.ONLINE

Look, our new logo!!