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Add The Lansing Journal to your mobile home screen

Instructions in words and pictures

by Melanie Jongsma

LANSING, Ill. (August 10, 2022) – When a local reader called me to ask what had happened to the Lansing Journal app he used to have on the home screen of his phone, I didn’t know what he was talking about. We don’t have an app (yet). But this reader told me his daughter had put The Lansing Journal on his phone for him, and he loved it. Somehow it had disappeared, and he wanted it back.

After some further conversation and some Googling, we figured out a solution. If you’d like the same convenient, easy access to local news, here are the steps, with photos. (Note: It might be easier to read this article on your desktop computer while accomplishing the steps on your phone.)

1.

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STEP 1. Find your web browser icon or your Google icon and open it. Depending on what kind of phone you have and what web browser you use, the button on your screen might look like one of these.

2.

STEP 2. In the Google search field or the URL field at the top of the screen, type in thelansingjournal.com to go to our home page. (The field might auto-complete if you visit our website often on your phone.) Make sure you are on the home page rather than an individual article page because the home page shows the most recent postings.

3.

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STEP 3. The next step is to find the Share option. On some phones, there are three buttons at the top right of the screen. Clicking these will open up a menu of options. Tap these dots to reveal a menu of options.
Home screen
On other phones there are icons at the bottom of the screen. The icon that looks like a piece of paper with an up arrow is the Share icon. Tap that to reveal the menu of sharing options.

4.

STEP 4. A menu of different ways to share will open, and you might need to scroll down a little bit to find the one that says Add to Home Screen. Select that.

5.

STEP 5. On the screen that opens, you can type in a shorter name, such as Journal or Local News or Better than the Trib — whatever is meaningful to you. This name will appear under the icon on your screen. If you choose not to type in a name, your web browser will use the default name. Once you’ve typed in a name, tap the Add button.

Success

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SUCCESS! A new icon will be added to your home screen with The Lansing Journal’s logo. It looks like an app, but it really is just a shortcut to our website where you can access all the local news we publish day by day.

Reader help

We are grateful for this Lansing reader who reached out to make us aware of the problem and then welcomed me onto his porch, so I could personally walk him through the steps of creating a Lansing Journal shortcut on his own phone’s home screen. He let me take his picture, but when I asked if I could use his name, he said, “Nah, people will know this face.” I let him know that I would be sharing this story because other readers might benefit as well.

Thank you, reader!

By the way…

By the way, when this reader called to get The Lansing Journal back on his phone, he remembered that he read one of our appeals for donations. “I meant to send you some money, but then I never did,” he told me. “Is that why you took the app away?”

I assured him that we hadn’t removed anything from his phone, and there is no “punishment” for not sending us a donation. The Lansing Journal is a free local newspaper.

Still, we do depend on local support. Donations from readers are what keep us going — whether it’s reporting local news or providing personalized tech support so that readers have the access they want.

Use the button below to choose whether you’d like to make a one-time donation or join us as a monthly supporter:

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Melanie Jongsma
Melanie Jongsma
Melanie Jongsma grew up in Lansing, Illinois, and believes The Lansing Journal has an important role to play in building community through trustworthy information.