Today’s Sunday Times spills much ink extolling the virtues of their new Web site, PerthNow. Finally, there is a vaguely half-decent, relatively frequently updated, online Western Australian news service!

(Behind the times? Us, in Perth? Never!)

Interestingly, several radio stations and Channel 9 Perth are jumping on the bandwagon, with the latter supposedly offering up news video … eventually. I wonder if that’s just a worried response to the fact that Channel 7’s Web site no longer sucks (as much) now that it’s run by Yahoo!?

That said, the execution of the new site leaves a bit to be desired. It doesn’t have its own domain name, it “embraces citizen journalism” by inviting people to e-mail in their photos, there are no direct links from the News Limited parent site, and the newspaper liftout has a huge article rabbitting on about blogs but the two (!) blogs on PerthNow are buried beneath several levels of links.

With Not The West having stopped the presses, and Aunty having only limited WA coverage, I guess WA journalism online will remain a wasteland for a while …