Slashdot Mirror
How Should News Magazines Make the Jump Online?
uctpjac asks: "A friend of mine, a deputy editor of a 1/2 million plus circulation serious news magazine, is responsible for determining what they should be doing online. They already do the usual - selected free articles, subscriber only articles, archive search, some online-only material that is regularly updated. She asked me to think about what more they should do. My first simple suggestion would be to improve their RSS feeds (longer, better article summaries): I imagine the newsreader is the application through which most of us will be reading bitty things like weblogs and news stories, and competing for attention there needs a nice juicy inducement to click-through. I actually think that a traditional news magazine like this should also be using its reader-community more extensively. Again, Slashdot is my model for this: the readers, as long as their comments are well organized, are often at least as interesting as the writers. Are there any examples of old-fashioned papers/magazines making good reader fora? What else will the magazine be doing online? What should it be doing in 3 years, when we all have our low power, high quality, ePaper editions?"
I would recommend that they not setup a reader forum at this stage (assuming they don't already have one). If they're still trying to even sort out what they're online strategies will be, they are presently not adequately staffed to deal with a forum/bulletin board (hint: they'll most likely need one full-time person to moderate/admin this). Sure, it can be something to put on the list as a future option, but they need to make sure they're equipped to handle it. Quite honestly, unless they seriously plan to change the scope/focus of the publication, what they are doing now is probably enough.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
You know, this has become a major pet peeve for me: problems with print or radio news media translating themselves online.
I live in a major metropolitan area, and we have a newspaper here I really love. I don't think it's the perfect paper, but I really like it. I think the print version is great.
However, for some reason, they can't get the online version nearly as good as the print version, and it drives me crazy. It's gotten better in recent years, but not nearly as good as the print version.
What especially drives me nuts is that the work that needs to be done is really basic. Things like layout and appropriate advertising.
In the print version, for example, you can tell that they really pay attention to every square millimeter of paper, and what goes there, and how it is processed visually by the reader. In the online version, in contrast, they pay almost no attention to it. There isn't the same amount of photographs, stories aren't organized, outlined, and highlighted to the same extent, so visually sorting material is impossible.
The online version of this paper is actually what made me realize that advertising can actually be enjoyable and useful. It took me awhile, but I eventually realized that many times, when I learned about a cultural or arts event, it was from an ad placed in the Arts and Entertainment section. In the online version, in contrast, you get ads for random things, that are totally unrelated to Arts and Entertainment--online, I could be reading the Arts and Entertainment section, and be surrounded by ads for power tools. Why do I want to see power tool ads when I'm obviously interested in arts and entertainment? They would never do such a thing in the print paper.
So my recommendation is this: before you get too worried about RSS feeds and nonsense like that (which aren't critical to most readers anyway), worry about getting the basics right. Test, brainstorm, improve, and test again things like presentation, layout, navigation, and advertisement. It's much more important.
Maybe after that point, work on customizable portals and things. But worry about the basics first.