Thanks to the NUS's Media Mailing list thingbob (one of their best-kept secrets), I've just found out about Palatinate, the online version of Durham University SU's fortnightly student newspaper.

Their website comes across much like I imagine UPSU.net does - a rapidly-evolving work of love by one or two hard-working HTML-geeks, and the results show (I admit I'm guessing about the webteam here, but the site feels a lot like someone's put a lot of work into it, and is perhaps still tweaking things as they go along...).

More importantly, the content is rich and diverse, ranging from features on the Union's clubs and societies (complete with pictures of Beautiful People™, of course ;o) through to the not-too-Geek-orientated weekly online news roundup (Facebook doing instant messaging? Srsly?!). In fact, revisiting the website to get the link to the Facebook article, I notice that they have a whole "online" section - not an entirely crazy idea, I suspect.

The content is also easily accessible (although the online front page appears to have a heavy bias towards comment which might just be down to layout tweaking than a lack of news-based content, it seems) and - yey! - they're using JonDesign's Smoothgallery (which I've gushed about previously) to rotate the top three news stories.

Very nice, and definitely worth subscribing to their RSS feed.

/al