RALEIGH – If you’re reading Carolina Journal Online, you’re getting a lot of valuable news, analysis, and commentary about North Carolina politics and public policy – but you may still be missing a lot.

Sure, we’ve recently redesigned and expanded Carolina Journal’s online presence, and it now provides its thousands of daily readers an even-better place to start their day. Our CJO daily news summary links you to some of the finest journalism available from North Carolina’s print and broadcast media. Each morning, we also post our own exclusive stories and commentaries from CJ staffers and contributing writers.

Just a click away are our newest CJ offerings. Our radio site posts excerpts and downloads from our weekly newsmagazine, which is broadcast on 20 stations from the mountain to the coast. It also provides you a handy list of North Carolina’s best-known talk-radio hosts and programs. And at Carolina Journal Television, you can watch a variety of video segments, including live-to-tape coverage of state press conferences, speeches at the John Locke Foundation, quick reaction to news stories, and outtakes from “N.C. Spin” and other television newscasts and talk shows.

But the CJ site is only one of many web offerings from the John Locke Foundation. Indeed, it accounted for only 20 percent of total JLF web pages viewed during the first quarter of 2009. So if you aren’t visiting the other 80 percent of JLF’s online output, what are you missing?

For starters, you’re missing the research, analysis, and commentary generated every day by JLF’s staff of policy analysts and adjunct scholars. Our Research team publishes lengthy Policy Reports, concise Spotlight briefing papers, and other materials on subjects ranging from taxes and transportation to education and health care. There’ll all available at JohnLocke.org, as are special columns, press releases, event invitations, background information, and JLF’s statewide issues blog, The Locker Room. JohnLocke.org attracts just over one-quarter of JLF’s total web traffic.

Speaking of blogs, JLF publishes four of the top 10 political blogs in North Carolina. We have regional sites devoted to five key regions of the state: Charlotte, the Triangle, the Triad, Wilmington/Southeastern NC, and Asheville/Western NC. (Sites devoted to the Sandhills and Down East regions are on the way.) These regional sites now account for the single-largest share of JLF’s web traffic – 44 percent during the first quarter of 2009.

If your interests lie in particular fields, subjects, or levels of government, JLF also operates several special Outreach projects that maintain their own websites: the North Carolina History Project, the Center for Local Innovation, the North Carolina Education Alliance, the Locke Faculty Affiliate Network, and the Morris Fellowship for Emerging Leaders. These sites account for the remaining 10 percent of JLF’s web traffic.

Of course, there are many other media sites, blogs, and online resources you should check out regularly if your goal is to stay abreast of North Carolina’s major news stories, political controversies, and public policy issues. You’ll find many of them linked here at CJ along the left-hand side of the homepage. But we appreciate the fact that so many North Carolinians now choose to begin their news day with us.

Thank you, and happy reading.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation