There is an unsaid law in web design that states that local newspaper sites have to present boring stories on their homepages and have uninteresting looks to them, but once in a while some sites manage to escape that logic, and MountainX.com is one of them.
With a nice layout to its credit, this site has managed to organize news in a way that make it easy to understand the hierarchy and relevance of the information on display, with a big plus to it: since the number of comments on each story is shown in a little bubble next to it, just by taking a look one can manage to figure out what the hot topics are. Mountain Xpress covers all the standard areas of local news: politics, community, trials, sports, weather, council affairs and community, with a big stress on the arts and entertainment scene, in a variety of media and articles of varying depth. I was thrilled to find that the paper is putting together a guide to local bands and artists, and user submissions are welcome. Precisely because they seem to be out and about hunting for local talents, I was expecting to find a directory of local blogs, which is a feature lots of similar publications are presenting, but no such thing is to be found at Mountainx.com. 
