Slashdot Mirror
Why Haven't Online Newspapers Gotten it Right?
An anonymous reader writes "Kirk McElhearn, writing at Kirkville, discusses why he thinks that online newspapers aren't up to snuff. While his article reflects an "old-fashioned" way of looking at newspapers, that is by reading them on paper as opposed to on the web, many of his points are valid. Most newspaper web sites are poorly designed, and don't easily inspire readers to read their content. He doesn't offer any solutions (other than getting rid of ads to make stories more readable) but the issues he raises do merit reflection by newspapers and other websites with large amounts of content."
...and I wrote a letter about it. No response yet.
I got sick of all the bread crumbs getting stuck into my laptop while eating breakfast.
paper still pwns.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Online sites in generally haven't gotten it right. If you can't read it on the porcelein throne, it isn't perfect.
That being said, look at what online publishers have to deal with: non-uniformity. HTML is very powerful, but we still can't guarantee that an article will look as nice on everyone else's monitor as it does on the publisher's. Digital fonts still have a VERY long way to go versus paper printed ones -- kerning and other newspaper processes are not as easy to perform in HTML.
PDF is a solution, but not a good one. HTML is far faster on every connection than PDF ever will be (try getting PDFs to look good on your mobile device).
AJAX won't help here because we're mostly talking about static data, and you run up against the different resolutions, screen sizes and operating system problems again.
I've seen some sites that use preset pixel-sizes tables and frames, and that keeps the site more consistent in look-and-feel, but still doesn't look the same system to system and browser to browser. If you have a huge monitor or a tiny one, these pages are a pain to browse.
Raster? Too big and too restrictive.
Flash? Does anyone actually use flash for content anymore?
I can't figure it out -- and I do believe that whoever DOES figure it out will have a pretty penny hitting them from the dead tree publishers.
I've been working on that problem for nearly 15 years. It bugged me back in my BBS running days. My only "solutions" I've come up with is to dump the browser entirely and offer "newspaper skins" for another type of Internet program: something that grabs raw articles from RSS or other feeds, displays them in the format YOU want to read them in, and even print them out newspaper-style. It isn't a great solution since it would require another app on devices that already are being app-downsized. RSS is key in this situation, but I don't think the RSS reader is the best way to display the information.
Just what I need, another username and password which, if I ever change browsers, will be lost. For what? Content that I can get elsewhere online, or through word-of-mouth chitchat at the office? Trust me, I am NOT clicking your banner ads, so the # of distinct page views is a meaningless metric to try and track. Just give me the content, or don't do it. The usefulness of the online medium is the a la carte mentality, don't try and apply an old model to it. Or come up with a way for anonymous micropayments (again, no FSCKING username/password) and for .25 USD, I'll read your damn paper online.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Of course the problem I have with many online newspaper websites is the fact that they require you to register to view their content. While I understand that is their right, I however can simply go to one of the many "free" news websites to get my daily dose of news.
Most of the author's problems with web design are solved by reading the New York Times via RSS.
I'd finish reading this post, but ....
...online newspapers can't hire good writers because they have little or no budget, which drives away customers, which leads to less budget? Just a guess.
Why would you trust a testimonial when choosing hosting?
I don't have any answer to this conundrum, I don't know the best way to do this, but I do know that no newspaper I've read online gets things right. I want
One solution would be for every news site on the internet to be re-written to please the author.
But why would they go to the expense? Particularly since they already have the author's eyeballs:
I get a lot of news from web sites: whether newspapers, magazines or TV channels, the main purveyors of information are the leading media brands. I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, along with other media web sites, and subscribe to RSS feeds for dozens of others.
Huh. Try The Guardian, especially the ball-by-ball and minute-by-minute cricket commentary.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
1. It's hard to read and article with a flash animation of a silhouette dancing with an iPod
2. It's hard to read an article if you have to subscribe to the site or enter in data about yourself (which most likely will be false anyway)
3. It would be advantageous to have each news site set up in different fashions (one for politics junkies, world news junkies, tech news junkies etc.,) so that the information that is most wanted is easily accessible with one click
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Here is the thing...Generally, newspapers are written for the grade 8 reading level and offer very little in the way of background, just a quick shot of information then on to the next story. Those that do that online, are not using the technology to build a user base. With the ability to post comments, papers like www.globeandmail.com give a reason for users to register online (to post comments)and create a richer experience where the point of view can be discussed.
Now I realize how much time I was wasting on a lot of fluff. Online, I read only the important things, I can catch up a few days at a time, and I can easily save articles, email the, etc. It's actually a much better experience.
... the fact that the papers only print once daily, and so have a few hours to make sure they get it right before print. Online news sites are in a rush to get the news out as quick as possible, if not "before the other guys do," so there will naturally be more initial mistakes. Other influencing factors could be... The lack of a big budget, lack of staff, lack of years of reputation to uphold, the fact that papers are harder to correct once printed.
But these same features are their downfall: readers of online media don't all see the same news, since they can customize what they want to see, and since many newspaper web sites display stories according to what readers have seen before; stories may change from hour to hour, even from minute to minute, so different readers will see different versions of stories.
This huge advantage of online media prevents debacles like "Dewey defeats Truman" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_E._Dewey from lasting more than a few minutes.
For what it's worth, if you're interested you might want to look here.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Unfortunately something else gets stuck in a geek's paper. So it's not a win-win situation.
...we'd could read the same articles in both the Business and Lifestyles sections... :)
I think the biggest problems newspapers have with making money off on-line offereings is this:
Almost nobody who buys the paper does so to get the news.
People who buy papers generally are looking for (in rough order of popularity and priority):
1. Comics
2. Crossword puzzles & brain teasers
3. Horoscopes
4. Sports stats
5. Movie listings
6. Everything else
Items 1-3 are typically not owned by your local paper, but purchased through syndication deals, so the three most popular items in your local paper are missing from the on-line version. Also, IIRC, major-league sports stats require an additinal fee to the leauge in question to re-post them (and users can find them for free from espn or league web sites anyway), so those are also typically omitted.
On top of that, the vast majority of "news stories" run in your local paper are cut-and-paste reprints of wire service reports. The amount of actual unique news content (not counting the editorials) is really very tiny in most papers. They are sort of like Karma whores who make "Link Slashdotted - Article Text" posts. (And they are every bit as redundant.)
Newspapers are not news companies, and have not been for a long time. They are ad space companies. They just happen to use news content as one of several ways in which they capture your eyeballs.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Because most companies get confused with decisions that let them choose between having a useful, profitable business and doing something that the decision-maker wants to be done for one reason or another.
-because their advertisers/parent company demand it (full-page flash ads, registration)
-they want to push an agenda (This week's editorial: Goofus and Gallant, staring Billy Boy and Linus Torvalds)
-plain ignorance (Physical newspapers don't sort articles by date/time, so we don't need to either)
-religion gets in the way (We won't publish news about white house scandal X because we beleive in magic sky being Y)
And that's just off the top of my head.
One of the more interesting things is that the NY Times and the WSJ took opposite approaches when it came to paid content. Remaining free at the WSJ - via OpinionJournal.com - is almost all of the editorial content that sparks discussions and draws people to the site. You pay for the hard fact reporting and business analysis that backs up the editorials and makes famously accurate projetions about the future of the market and world events. The NY Times makes all of the daily reporting free, and then makes people pay to see the editorials that might otherwise keep people coming back to the NY Times' site. (For me, the net result has been that I continue paying for the WSJ subscription, but have stopped visiting the NY Times' site altogether.) Hiding the editorials behind Times Select has also lead to far fewer people linking to the NYT as the majority of the free content is already available in varying forms from hundreds of other sources.
The International Herald Tribune www.iht.com
You'll want to click on an article to discover the true value though as it doesn't get really good until you start reading content...
Notice how the entire article is already loaded into the page but it's broken up into 3 column sections that shuffle to a new page of text when you click the 'next page' button (which is triggered by clicking anywhere on the first or third columns), without reloading the html page (and without reloading a bunch of ads and all the 'extras' including the useful tools).
This design is sooo much easier to read than any other I've found.. the only thing that comes close is a simple long page of text but even that has it's drawbacks as it becomes difficult to read when you are constantly scrolling every few paragraphs. In fact if you want to read it that way they have an 'article tool' to 'change the format' to vertical scrolling as well.
The only thing I can think of to make it better is if they used keybindings on the arrow keys and pg up pg dn keys to control the buttons (though this is probably an issue of standard behavior across browsers at this time).
On the commercial side of things, it looks like their text ads at the bottom are also going to be the most relevant ads they can be as they are based on the entire text and not some short summary or 1/5 of the article.
As for the rest of the site... it's clean. Yes there are ads but they don't let them be too obtrusive and they way it's layed out, if you have ad blocking enabled, you won't even notice them being gone (which not all sites do well.. often removing the ads ruins the overall layout and is just as difficult to read as having them in).
IHT is an exemplary site. I won't compare their content but as far as design and usability is concerned, they are the #1 Newspaper site on the web today.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I think he may be on to something. Personally, I enjoy a simple, no-frills site that gives me the news. My hometown's paper has a nice, simple layout for their site.
The worst part of reading a pulp newspaper is navigating the various pages to read the articles. Editors love to post "hunks" of articles across various pages, for various reasons. Some, to free up space on the Front Page, but most of the time it seems simply to force you to skim ads as you search for the next 4-inches of article text. And of course the text is smashed up into small columns already so as to fit around the ads in the paper. Personally, I hate trying to read the 'paper'.
So now we have online news. Well, again many times it is hard to read and navigate because the text is often smashed into thin columns and forced around ads (often obnoxious, animated ads). Most online articles worth reading are broken into multiple "pages" which need to be clicked through, and entirely unneccessary most of the time, except to create more opportunity for ads. Online "papers" seem to be designed by similar people whom design the print versions, with the same headaches for readers.
A side note, and personal peeve. Online, you see a lot more press releases passed around as actual news items.
{ - Generic Guy - }
If reading on the toilet is your thing. Then this might work for you. A while back I was reading about how someone in Korea (I think) made it so you could print on the toilet paper. The seat would know who was on it by their weight and then print out RSS feeds accordingly. This easily accomidates the people that would like to read the physical paper but also like to get the most recent news possible. If reading on toilet paper just isnt the same, then just have a printer near or in your bathroom. This brings me to another solution. You want to have the feel, smell, and ink on your fingers. If there were reprintable news paper. Something that you could print on over and over again. You could print out the news paper when ever you want. I dont think this is too far off b/c of the advances with reusable paper.
The newspapers are too trapped in the old paradigm of finding news and deciding what to write about. Instead they should open up the flood gates and let the readers decide what they want to hear about. While that idea will sound horridly scary to editors who's job it normally is to pick stories, allowing your users the interactive choice will increase readership.
Which would you want? A newspaper that picked stories based on what they thought would get readers, or one that listened to what you actually wanted to read about.
Niche content wins online.
The paper version of the newspaper has a well established format that's proven to work. The are trying to move that to the web where most people filter their news. Newspaper all or nothing. You subscribe or you don't. A headline grabs you and purchase the paper, or you don't. Online news has been built around specialist sites and blogs that focus on one subject. People use google and portals to build their own newspaper. Newspapers need to create specialized content that is local or valued. It'll help if I can pull the stories I want into my feed. I'd love to see a "just the facts" overview with clearly marked content from avocates and specialists in the field. Wiki like contributions from trusted sources and feedback from other readers.
You ever try to juggle a lap-top on your knees while trying to do your business?
And, besides, you can't swat flies with your lap-top either...(well, I guess you could......)
"give me a good online newspaper, and I'll be happy to pay for it. As long as there are no ads..."
I didn't look at the ads for the books he was hawking on his site, but if he had anything to do with them I would suspect there are ten pieces of information and two hundred pages of fluff in each one.
One interesting alternative is to publish the whole newspaper, page by page, online.
For example, Chile's Las Últimas Noticias does this.
I find it easier to find interesting stories this way. If you think about it, it makes sense: a lot of though goes into the layout and heading size of the print version, why not take advantage of this in the online version?
d.
My motorbike travels in Chile.
They should offer podcasts of the articles. That way some of us could listen to the newspaper while on our way to work, or while working at the office.
Some newspapers are getting it right by offering a part of an all new and fresh article on the internet, to read the rest, you have to buy the actual newspaper. Of course this only works with exclusive content. As for buying the newspaper it-self, it's another step. If someone never buy newspaper, he won't be buying newspaper suddently.
These chats allow you to talk with the writer and typically an expert to further flesh out the story.
Additionally, these chats can lead to follow up articles. One example is the "housing real-estate bubble" around the DC suburbs; there were follow on articles about the aftermath of adjustable, interest-only mortgages.
These chats really give you a feeling of connection with the paper and even the community. Before going to a concert in DC I asked the Going Out Gurus wether I should drive into the District or take a Metro (the verdict: Drive, but watch out for parking).
This interactive approach to a newspaper is what keeps it current, hip, and helps the end-user feel connected. A local slashdot buddy said "If the chats went to a Pay-to-play scheme, I'd probably pay. They are worth it."
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
What you want to read about?
What I want to read about?
Would be drowned out in a tidal wave of celebrity gossip, if newspapers actually went be what most people wanted.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
I find articles of interest on different newspaper sites. One of the biggest pains is having to register before being allowed to look at content. I don't care what their marketing departments wants. I usually put in dummy information just to screw up their database. I know the newpaper executives have the puritan attitude of "you are not going to get what you want unless you work for it!". Usually the executives and the marketing department are in bed with each other and work closely.
When marketing gets a hold of something, they royally screw things up.
Does anyone else find it mildly amusing that stuck in the bottom of the article between the comments and the article is a big, fat, moving FLASH animation advertisement?
Maybe it's just me....
"I love lamp."
Welcome to the game of freeloader.
Content creators on one side. On the other is societies raised decades on the entitlement mentality. Makes you want to weep for humanity. Or at least laugh and point at those humans from the safety of your alien Mars base.
I have a feeling if there was an easy way to pay them $.50 to read an issue (just like dropping a few quarters into a "newspaper machine"), they'd give us more reasons to keep coming back, and to keep reading their content (and to get us to go through -more- content to see their advertisements).
I know plenty of online newspapers/magazines have a way to pay for a subscription, but... I like the "newspaper machine" model -- I don't get a paper daily cause i like to pick and choose between papers.
The other great thing about the physical "newspaper machines" is that... You can pay the $.X and grab out more than one paper. Which is especially handy if you need to cover up cat puke, miscellaneous liquid spills & pizza dropped onto the floor, so you can get back to the slinging code.
That's pretty annoying, but they made it easy to close. I agree with the "use printer friendly version" comment to avoid ads (on sites where that's available). I'm surprised more folks haven't made the connection.
You know, it's interesting. We (humans) are quite good at indexing and sorting things. When most of us were toddlers, we learned how to put square pegs through square holes...how to organize things (toys) by color, shape, or function. When we learned how to read, we started small, but worked our way up to understanding the sections of a newspaper and what was fun (Comics) and what was not (Business). As our skills developed, some of us found journalists that we liked and some that we didn't - this helped us further refine our "searches" through newspapers.
e rywhere.ap/index.html. They're not talking about online newspapers, but I believe the issue they describe is the same one we face with online newspapers.
Sections, headlines, story titles, author, location - all metadata that is used by us to index the info in a newspaper. I don't think we have the capacity to use many more pieces of metadata to index a newspaper - there's a reason the newspaper is in the form it is today...we have hundreds of years of refinement. Newspapers that sucked weren't bought and "natural selection" resulted in industry norms etc that present the user with a very consistent interface. If I read the NY Times, the interface is similar to the Wall St Journal, USA Today, etc. It's predictable, easy-to-use, and well-defined. My choices are limited, but the format is similar.
The web is a lot bigger than a newspaper - and the web presents the user with a number of different sources for info - all in a very inconsistent format. when I was growing up, there were 2 daily newspapers that we subscribed to - the Hartford Courant and the Journal Inquirer. Neither one was perfect, but they worked the same way for me. Today, if I don't like something I see on CNN.com, I've got a gazillion other choices out there. The challenge to the user is to find a mix of news sources that meet their appetites for knowledge. They also need to wade through the mountains of crap website designs that mean no 2 news sites are the same. I'm all for individual expression and I love clever unique designs - I like to think I've come up with a few in my time - but it does present the user with an interesting problem to solve. Some of us get it, some of us don't. Remember that article about Google users having a richer online experience? Some of that is because of Google - but some of that is because of the people as well. People who use Google are more likely to be able to cope with information overload and quickly parse out the important bits.
CNN has another take on it here http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/12/26/information.ev
How do we make sense out of petabytes of data? This is why I think the work Google is doing w/Google Print and the work IBM is doing with UIMA http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima is so critical. We've long since outgrown the day that a file cabinet was capable of organizing all the info that's important to us. We've outgrown the filesystem as well. And the web has outgrown us.
People read newspapers for:
* News
* Opinion
* Fun
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ and http://www.cnn.com/ have news completely sewn up in my mind. I wouldn't think of going to a newspaper's website for news - it'll probably be out of date in comparison.
Fun - there are more fun things to do online, and reading a paper newspaper is much much more enjoyable than reading something on your laptop - less eye-strain, less weight, less worrying about $1000 of equipment having coffee spilled on it.
So that leaves Opinion. There's a wealth of opinion on the net already, but some of the best opinion pieces come from newspapers. But I rarely go and seek these out - I'm normally pointed to them by other people. Besides, I read opinion pieces as a leisure activity - so see the above point.
+Pete
Score:-1, Funny
It's hard to tell from the site, but I think IHT is a New York Times publication. See... http://www.iht.com/images/misc/breakfastsub33.jpg
There seem to be two points here that have been covered too many times already.
The first is web site design. Kirk (no relation) complains that you can't scan or skim on news websites, but a lot of sites have designs that approximate this. The Onion has on its front page headlines, and about a paragraph of text. Just go through this page and you're scanning.
The second issue is pay vs advertising. Peoples opinions seem to be divided on this. Everyone curses NY Times online for requiring registration, but several people have already commented on this article saying "I'd gladly pay, just get rid of the ads". Well, you have to have one or the other, and whichever method an online news site chooses, someone's not happy about it.
In any case, these issues have been covered before, and it looks like this is just another blogger making up fluff-filled articles to try to wring out some revenue from his site. I wish this non-news wouldn't make it past the Slashdot editors.
Once upon a time I made daily visits to my local paper's online site. It was a pretty straightforward interface that allowed me to browse all of the major headlines as I scrolled down the page. Then one day, they redesigned their site, segmenting more of the content and filling the first half of the initial page load to PDF links to section covers. I bailed fast and made my way to the competing paper across the river (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota still has two daily rags). While not my preferred news source, it was easy to navigate and I could, once again, scroll down a single page with the primary headlines (similar to the layout here at Slashdot). Then, this year, they had to muck with things, too, and now the main online page is laid out in a fashion similar to the physical paper. I sent them a long message describing what worked with the old site, and what (imo) didn't with the new. No luck there. I want to find information by a quick run through a page. I don't want to pay attention to call-out boxes and other areas where they place content. If it is important, give it to me in one smooth-scrolling column. That said, I will still visit the local paper sites if there are specific things I am looking for (e.g. news on a fire in the neighborhood), or if I am completely bored out of my skull. Otherwise, I skip them entirely. If I want news, I'll either create a custom topic on Google News (news.google.com), or I'll hit one of the big network homepages to monitor developing stories. On a side note, it would be interesting to see how TV stations scramble to adjust their content, since you can read about most of the general news they report hours or days before their telecasts.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
The main problem I have with the big sites is monitor burnout. My eyes get tired of the computer screen after ... hours a day. No amount of responsible/innovative layout is going to solve that. And blinking click-me animations are enough to make you turn on Flash block.
...
I find some blog sites interesting but blogging software limits the layout - and the bloggers I've tried to work with
1) resent the fact they aren't setting type with their fingers,
2) fear html or changing anything because 2a) they won't learn. 2b) they'll be at the mercy of their tech support,
3) think I/we/they should stop complaining.
The web is different. How does the cliche go: New wine, old bottles (?)
Newspapers are a passive medium -> they write, we read.
The web is an active medium -> we write, we link, we comment. Big news organizations try to monetize the only way they know how - sell it and sell ad space.
That said I think more should be done with rollover text. Roll over headline and summary text appears in summary window. Click and article comes in. Click again and the javascript breaks
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
heres a news site that got it right
No adverts
loads of rss feeds and tech news
http://reallysimplenews.com/
That was the point that got me. It seems that he's taking the main advantage of online newspapers and turning it into a fault.
That said, a master's candidate recently did a critique of my paper's website, and he was brutal to a fault. He didn't understand the concerns of the newsroom -- or even how our print publication, which is unique, worked -- at all in many of his arguments, he picked away at the tiny stuff, and essentially ticked away at some of the things that lowly web design people and newsroom folks (I'm the latter, a graphic designer to be exact) can't touch for corporate reasons.
Which eventually leads to my main point: Often, the structure of the newsroom is the problem with making many of the improvements needed. Advertising won't budge on something, administration won't budge, a reporter will get pissed if their story isn't given the play it deserves, editors don't trust their readers.
But large newspaper sites? It's like vomited information, in blown chunks every-which-where, with no helpful structure, and it's starting to dry and get a little discolored. One of the things that my paper (Bluffton Today) has done, is that it's taken the interactive community elements and played them up. We're probably the only newspaper in the world that uses Drupal as a CMS. We've basically relegated, for better or worse, most of our content to a print version of the newspaper that you can weed through in an "As Printed" section. The decreased focus on the paper's content (which is distributed free to 16,500 people throughout the community anyway) has had the side effect of getting to the meat of what we should be for our town: A resource for the community, and an organic one at that. The blogs and spotted galleries are our centerpiece, and that's what makes it unique and useful to readers.
That's the kind of thing, whether through institutional weaknesses or traditional thinking that large papers just suck at. There's such a focus on news judgment -- and how theirs is better than readers -- that they don't want to open the community input can of worms. Instead, they can't think outside the newshole or the thousands of tr and td tags that make up a newspaper front page.
A friend of mine, an online editor for a Big 10 college paper, recently mentioned a talk he had with the editor of his college newspaper. He wanted to try some untraditional things similar to Facebook or MySpace, and the editor essentially brought up the trust issue -- he didn't trust his readers to have as good of news judgment as he did. That sort of institutional thinking is bad for an industry as a whole, and I have a feeling my more open-minded friend will go a lot further than that editor will because he is looking at the prize when it comes to online journalism, and it isn't the same prize as print. The prize is taking the community and making them just as much of the news generation process as the newsroom itself. When it comes to online newspaper websites, that's the untapped resource, seeping its way through the tertiary levels of the soil, beginning to surface in the newsroom -- well, after someone moves the coffee maker off the top of it.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
I don't know, it just bugs me how poorly laid out these web sites are.
For example, I am not going to buy something just because it's in the middle of the article. For free sites, ads are fine with me; but when they're simply intrusive, I draw the line.
Let's take some other tech sites for example. Some PCMagazine.com articles look interesting, but I avoid them completely because they put ads in the middle.
Free registration is also boneheaded- if you're going to put ads, why do it WITHOUT registering? You let less people see them!
The other problem-due to the (vast) difference between print design and web design, is how hard it is to find interesting content. How about-I don't know, experiment a bit. Try laying it out as an ACTUAL newspaper, where each link is a headline. Put a short description. Then, people might find interesting news...
One last thing is the complete irrelevance of ads on many major news sites-While I am often interested by ads on specific sites (slashdot even), I hate when I'm reading an article on healthcare and an ad to "Hit Osama for a free PSP!" pops up. It's annoying and makes sure I won't click on the ad.
It's not HTML's job to do so. That's the browser's job.
Digital fonts still have a VERY long way to go versus paper printed ones -- kerning and other newspaper processes are not as easy to perform in HTML.
Again, not the job of HTML. Job of the browser. "Kerning" is never adjusted except by font-defined rules; you probably meant tracking, which is increasing or decreasing letter spacing across the board. Tracking and "other newspaper processes" are somewhat specific to the needs (or constrains) of the paper/physical format. I've handled the layout+formatting for a 30 page newsletter, and I use tracking purely to make stuff fit. A 5-10 increase in tracking is almost completely imperceptable to the human eye on 10 pt text, but will help make an article perfectly "fill" its intended space.
I honestly don't see what the fuss is about. Perhaps the problem is that people persist in applying layout concepts for paper to the web, trying to dress up a webpage to look prettier, loosing sight of the fact that it's the content stupid, not the formatting?(emphasis added for irony ;-). You can have the prettiest web layout for your newspaper, but if the writing sucks, your facts aren't accurate and your articles are biased- nobody's going to read your news website for very long.
Most newspapers just list articles in sections, and do one-webpage-per-article. Fine by me, and I strongly suspect it's fine for the other billion or so people who read newspaper websites throughout the world. The good ones do inline images matching the article; the so-so ones do images in the same place in every article (ie top, bottom, or in a sidebar.) The worst ones just don't bother at all, unless the article is really important.
I honestly stopped reading the web log entry about a third of the way in because it was whiny and rambling.
Please help metamoderate.
Yes, online newspapers are terrible. But until they figure out site architecture and navigation, they could at least provide a search feature that works. More often than not it doesn't. You put in a keyword for a recent article, and get nothing back but gibberish. Another problem is broken links. It makes no sense to link your own website to a newspaper article, because they'll break the link within weeks. But perhaps most annoying is how they prevent deep linking, and throw you back to their home page -- where it's impossible to find the article you were looking for.
This article was total crap.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Part of it is that newspapers are having the darndest time accepting transparency as part of the medium.
For example, the local paper (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) won't break out for potential customers its visitor count by who comes to read the stories and who visits just to read classifieds or wantads. That's indicative of a "this information is ours and we'll use it the way we want to" attitude which, in an OPEN marketplace like the web, means that advertisers will simply spend their money elsewhere.
Eventually, even the readers feel this and - as a news source - the site dies.
Particularly when the only real NEWS you get from your paper is the local news (just go to Reuters or AP or other free sites for quicker world/national news), and even THAT is dying in this age of giant multicity media conglomerates that have let their local coverage die in favor of a stream from some HQ somewhere else....congratulations, they're being pwned by a media stream that's QUICKER, CHEAPER, and (frankly speaking) more reliable than their 19th-century business model.
-Styopa
Not quite solving all the issues, web distributors such as [newsstand.com] go for the traditional approach of delivering online the identical content that is in the print edition of major newspapers and magazines, right down to the advertisements and special sections. As 70-90% newspaper cost is in distribution, publishers love this idea.
The world, of course, awaits the cheap paper-display technology (or floppy computers) that can be seen in the movies (such as Harry Potter and Minority Report).
The Admin and the Engineer
here?
The sad part is I'd pay good money to get e-mailed a .PDF of the Los Angeles times or the Orange County Register (the local rag) that I could either print up for reading certain sections of, and/or transfer to my laptop for further reading en route to, or at the office. Alas, neither of them do this yet...they still want to drop a ton of paper at my doorstep which is inconvenient and bulky. Then they wonder why, despite numerous solicitations, why I never subscribe though I find them both enjoyable reads...
...in bed
I read the WSJ online everyday. Not the whole paper mind you, but the bits I want, which are easy to extract becasue of their fantastic layout. Web Front page is configurable, but by default comes with "what's new" , much like the middle section of the dead tree Journal, Links & summaries to the stories that were on the dead tree Front page under that, and links to columns & opinion on the right. All stories and pages are layed out for the web. If you want a pdf of the paper, you have to go explicitly get it. One click takes you to a text only table of contents for the day's paper. Most stories have a headline & a sentence or two on what it's about, making picking what you want to read easy. Only complaint - RSS feeds were useless. ONLY headlines, no first couple of lines, made it very unusable. Now remember - compared to the average local paper, the WSJ's content is like NPR compared to the local radio station news - in depth, and accurate. Don't go looking for a quickie roundup of the day's news. And, unlike NPR, though the editorial board of the WSJ is slightly right of Atilla the Hun, NONE of it comes through the stories. They are (truly) objective presentations of the facts. Yes, there is a business concentration to their choice of stories, but it the same paper when the editorials can compare unions to terrorists, they can present very balanced stories about unions striking.
Mostly, I still buy the paper because I can't bring myself to take a
laptop into the crapper.
It is difficult for newspapers to stay as current as the web. News websites are able to turn on a dime, and even change their headlines before anyone notices that they are totally wrong ;)
I bet that if you killed all the ads, remove the sales reps, and got the paper down to one section, it could pay for itself with no ads. It's CONTENT, people!
I use the BugMeNot Firefox extension and it works great. For those who don't know, BugMeNot has a database of bogus (presumably) registrations, and the extension pulls one and fills in the login information for you. Technology to the rescue!
Ok, you definitely want to read this.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Secondarily, an average newspaper page is what, 17x22 per page, 22x34 unfolded? Which allows detailed halftone and color pictures alongside the data, and still leaves room for the all important revenue producing ads. The average home computer screens is maybe 12x15 max, or half the size, but instead of a dot being 1/200 of an inch, the dot resolution on a monitor is usually set to 1/72 if I remember right. So the newspaper page has what, 18x the "pixel" data space?
These two publication worlds are apples and oranges, and it takes a very clever web design team and a great journalism team to approximate the best part of the newspaper world (dynamic and relevant content + strong fact checking) delivered on an edition basis. Can't say that I have seen that particular combination done very well online myself.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I used to work in a big newspaper. This is all just my personal opinion and nonsensical rantings. Don't sue me.
A website's editorial content or journalistic determination isn't the problem. Despite hard working researchers and reporters, more than 90% of the news came from the people. Press releases, internal leaks, revelations about a competitor. The news flowed in to the fax machines and telephones like a sewer. The editorial and journalist jobs were filtering the garbage, checking for bias and veracity, and then making it understandable. Other than a few high profile "investigative reports" the newspaper got exclusive tips because people go out of their way to pass them on to a big audience publication. Some people read the paper for those "breaking news" stories. And because the newspaper has an established audience, it will continue to get the juicy news tidbits. Having seen so much crap and biased stories, the editors on the paper are better at throwing away crap before it runs. A news website that runs an "Exclusive" because of a tip from a competitor that doesn't deal with 500 hot tips a day may be really running an exclusive tip, but more than likely is being played like a piano.
There's also a lack of trust about the web. Yes, even today. Let's look at coupons. The Sunday paper always sold bigger than any other because of the massive coupons enclosed. Most of them were crap and really only designed as feedback that "Yes, your ads are being seen" to the retailers. In fact, it seems that a web coupon would work better because it could be customized with a serial number and much more information encoded about the viewer. The problem is that consumers think of coupons as money. They ones that are printed in color on high-gloss, heavy weight paper are thought of as more valuable than the black and white newsprint ones even if they offer the same value. If that's your attitude, what would you think of a coupon that you printed out yourself on your own printer? Even if it had a barcode, unique id's, and far more valuable information to the retailer about your statistics, most people would view these "print it yourself" coupons as just one step up from counterfeiting or writing "Save 20%" on a piece of notebook paper. Worthless. There are still many people who bend over backwards to clip and save "real" coupons and this still offers real feedback about the value of newspaper advertising today. Even with the great improvement offered by the web, it's not a trend that's going to be changed without a lot of re-education.
Many websites I've seen have a determined and energetic editorial crew. That's great, but the news stories and editorials people write are just the bait. They aren't what keeps the reader coming back. People who don't understand the difference are confusing the journalistic content with the data content of a paper. For example, back in the eighties when I used to be big into comic books there was a newspaper called the Comic Buyer's Guide. No idea if it's still around today, but it was a weekly paper that offered editorial content about trends in comics, reviews, highlights of new writers and artists, interviews. Most of this very niche content were opinions I agreed with or subjects I wanted to read, but a big portion of the paper was the release schedules of when Marvel and DC would be putting out the next crossover series. I may have started picking up the paper because of the big Alan Moore or George Perez interview, but I became a regular reader because I got my lists of upcoming comics from them. Heck, even after I started to disagree with their attitudes and editorial stances, I still picked it up because of the data dump I was familiar with. The data dumps in newspapers are the sports scores, television listings, movie schedules, stock market results and many more. This data can today be dumped into the newspaper with no human intervention so it's very lucrative. Even some things like the personals, comics, horoscopes, and paid obituaries are set up to be constructed in a sim
The one thing I really hate is the online version will go through "revisions". There doesn't seem to be a mechanizim in place to "freeze" the story. I can't count the number of times I've gone to a news site and had the story I read three hours ago changed, words added, phrases re-wrote. Quotes changed! WTF? How can that be used as a reference if it's a "living document"?
At least when I see it on a dead tree, the only way to revise the story is with a correction the next day or so.
They should treat the online stories like accounting entries....when it's in....it's in. You need to add another transaction to reverse the previous one...there's no erasing/deleting/changing of entries after they're in.
And to those of you who say...."they're just correcting errors" or whatnot...then maybe they shouldn't post it until they've had a chance to proofread and check sources.
WTF? Over?
I don't think online newspapers can get it right, because I don't think there's any such thing as an online newspaper done right.
Newspapers (as the name suggests) are an artifact of print. You don't need them online. If there's anything good in the New York Times today, I'll hear about it on Slashdot or Reddit or Digg. Why bother going to the Times's own front page, where all I get are Times articles?
Anyone click on any of Google News' links the Yahoo/CBS streaming TV article yesterday? (Still on the front page this am...)
I had to to hit about five different articles before I found a link to the site that they were all reporting on, and I believe the site I found it on was new web media, not a traditional paper's site.
It blows me away how the printed media can consistently, even stubbornly, leave out hyperlinks (in both their web and print versions) when discussing events on the web itself.
What's up with that?
I worked in newsrooms for a lot of years, and lived through several redesigns of print products. A tool that was really useful was Eyetrack, a tool that improves reader studies by strapping a camera to their head and documenting which page feature (headlines, photos, text) catch the reader's eye. This has been used in newspaper redesigns since the early 1990, and was also used in a major study of online news sites in 2004. There's a lot of data there that is based on readers' actual practice, rather than conjecture about what editors' or consultants believe about design. I think the 2004 study helped a lot of online news sites improve their designs, as it confirmed advice that many web experience professionals had been sharing with newspapers.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
As an employee at a major newspaper site (serving several newspapers), I have to say that I agree. I hate pretty much every design decision ever made on our sites, but part of our "mission" (at least what I gather is our mission), is to fill in for the weaknesses of the newspapers. We do what we can, but it's not easy. We're limited by the rigid templates we're forced to work with, and arcane technology doesn't exactly help. Despite the fact that our site is covered in ads, and the company is destroying its year-over-year goals, it seems like very little investment is made on improvements. We're very short-staffed, and if others are like me here, underpaid and underappreciated. Believe it or not, there's a real shortage of people with with the combination of journalism and Web tech skills that many of the jobs require.
More people would be a big help, but our site, like many others, seems to be more of a way to sell ads than actually get the news across. It really sucks, and I wish we could get more support from the company. I think a lot of people in similar positions at other news sites feel the same way.
My problem with most all newspaper sites online is that they carry the exact same damn national and international AP/Rueters articles that every other news site on the Internet carries, and they cover their home page with them, making it difficult, if not impossible, to find just the local news.
If I go to a local newspaper website, it is because I am looking primarily for news about that locality. Why would I get my national and international news from the Podunk Journal if getting it from CNN, the BBC, and the NYT was just as easy?
Physical newspapers were limited by the needs of the printing press. Satelite distribution and on-demand printing has somewhat changed that, but newspapers seem to still be stuck on this mentality of "we are the only news source for this certain geographic area, so we have to cover all of the news."
The Internet has changed that, and I am still waiting for newspaper websites to catch up to that. I am fine if your physical paper carries national and international news (indeed, I encourage it), but your website is going to have a different readership entirely.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
On-line newspapers might benefit from the same kind of breakthrough brought to on-line map websites by Google Maps.
That is to say, MapQuest, Yahoo Maps etc. -- the standard on-line maps for years -- offered very poor map-reading experience. Navigating a region by means of click-driven discrete re-drawings to change map centers and scales is very unsatisfactory, compared to rolling out a large paper map. It's reminiscent of nothing so much as peering at a mural through a keyhole.
The genius of Google Maps is that by caching map information from outside the visible map window border, it is possible to pan/scroll continuously. Re-scaling through that slider seems faster too, although I'm not sure whether that's just subjective. In any event, the ability to quickly pass through a range of centers and scales makes the on-line map reading experience much closer to the physical version, and allows far more information to be synthesized much more quickly.
It seems to me that some of the same ideas could be carried over to newspapers, so as to preserve some of the more satisfactory aspects of reading the paper edition.
For example, when I read the physical paper, I have a lot of information available to help me decide whether I want to invest time in reading a full article. I can read the headline, of course, but I can also quickly scan the first couple of paragraphs, as well as any accompanying photos, graphics, and sidebars. This can all be taken in in a few seconds, leading to a pretty accurate assessment of whether it will be worthwhile to read the full article.
In the on-line edition of a newspaper, on the other hand, for most articles there is only the headline to go on, embedded in the HTML anchor tag. The headline is often obscure. To find out what it means, you have to click, and wait for a re-draw. The psychological threshold for reading an article is higher (at least for me). As a result, I find that I skim the on-line edition far more lightly than I do a physical edition.
The reform analogous to the Google Maps breakthrough would be to supply the newspaper pages as continuously scrollable images, available at various scales. At the largest scale, only headlines would be legible, while text would be legible at inner zoom levels. Clicking on any article headline would result in the individual article being served up as it is now. Pan/scroll would allow one to cross page boundaries.
The resulting experience would be much closer to reading a physical paper, in that much more information is presented to the reader prior to "committing" to read a full article. I would certainly enjoy the NYT much more in this kind of format.
GNU Info is documentation optimized for machine readability
And that's the problem. Why would you read a newspaper site for ANYTHING but local news?
There are a million news sites on the web. There are a million comics on the web. There are classified ads, editorials...everything. Good quality stuff is easy to find, and there's just so MUCH of it.
Seriously. What does a local paper offer besides local news that isn't important enough to get reported on other sites? Nothing.
The only advantage newspapers still have is their portability. Reading and actual printed paper is nicer than reading off of your monitor.
Why newspapers work better than their website counterparts is because they tilt the balance towards "pushing" content to us, rather than having us "pull" content. There's too much of interest happening in world for readers to be able to figure out what they should pull.
One website that almost gets it right is http://www.pressdisplay.com/ - it gives you scanned copies of (real) newspapers, and makes it easy to read them straight from your browser. Of course you pay for all but the front pages, but you avoid those nagging online ads.
The problem isn't with newspapers. It's with the state of journalism. Most newspapers these days don't have traditional reporters who go out and actually "investigate" stories. And if they do, they have a laundry list of taboo subjects (aka things that might tweak the advertisers) that they can't address or their editors will reject. As a result, most "reporters" just rewrite wire reports and manufacture fluff pieces... for example, I was in Florida last week and picked up the daily paper, and there was a major story on how your personality type can be identified by the way in which you sneeze! Yes, folks, this is apparently big-time news in the capital of Florida smack in the middle of the holiday season!
Why haven't they gotten it right? Why are almost all managers idiots? They didn't used to be idiots, when they did real work. Something sucked their brains dry after being promoted.
Perhaps the newspapers are stuck in old failing business models, just like the RIAA and the MPAA. All will soon fail, it is just a matter of time & waiting them out.
I was talking this morning with a journalist of the old school who really understands layout, and in fact we were discussing the new Guardian format. He was describing how, in effect, the constraints of point by point layout for offset printing, and the need to design physical pages, mean that until people have years of experience with a new format they cannot get the best out of it. He thinks that the new Guardian layout will be really good in a few years...but for now, some content is being sacrificed to the need to fit the page layout blocks of the format.
So why is this precise newspaper layout required? Partly for visual effect, of course, for the minority of people who have the necessary visual skills to appreciate it. But partly to produce something that can be read by the target audience. Because the audience cannot change the face and style to suit their requirements, it is hard to produce a one size fits all. The front page of a paper newspaper has to meet many conflicting requirements and so always is a compromise.
Sometimes, of course, the front page is a thing of beauty where the images and the headlines join up to support the meaning of the stories. But how often does that happen nowadays? I could go on, but you've made the points already.
Pining for the fjords
Student's tall tale revealed
ALL NEWSPAPERS SUCK...AT LEAST ONLINE NEWSPAPERS ARE MORE OBJECTIVE, OPEN, AND LESS EFFECTED BY IDIOTIC DWEEBS WITH $....AND AT LEAST ONLINE NEWSPAPERS DO NOT SMELL LIKE DEAD TREE AND SKINK INK...
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articl es/2005/12/24/students_tall_tale_revealed/
Confesses fabricating US surveillance story
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff | December 24, 2005
It rocketed across the Internet a week ago, a startling newspaper report that agents from the US Department of Homeland Security had visited a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth at his New Bedford home simply because he had tried to borrow Mao Tse-Tung's ''Little Red Book" for a history seminar on totalitarian goverments.
The story, first reported in last Saturday's New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.
But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.
The professor, Brian Glyn Williams, said he went to his former student's house and asked about inconsistencies in his story. The 22-year-old student admitted it was a hoax, Williams said.
''I made it up," the professor recalled him saying. ''I'm sorry. . . . I'm so relieved that it's over."
The student was not identified in any reports. The Globe interviewed him Thursday but decided not to write a story about his assertion, because of doubts about its veracity. The student could not be reached yesterday.
Williams said the student gave no explanation. But Williams, who praised the student as hard-working and likeable, said he was shaken by the deception.
''I feel as if I was lied to, and I have no idea why," said Williams, an associate professor of Islamic history. He said the possibility the government was scrutinizing books borrowed by his students ''disturbed me tremendously."
The story stems from an incident in the fall in a history seminar on totalitarianism and fascism taught by a colleague of Williams, Robert Pontbriand. The student, who was in the seminar, told Pontbriand he had requested an unabridged copy of ''Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung" through the UMass interlibrary loan system for a research paper.
Days later, he told Pontbriand, he was stunned to get a visit by Homeland Security agents who told him the book was on a ''watch list" and asked why he wanted it. Pontbriand was appalled. ''A university is a place for the open inquiry for the truth," he said.
The story quickly made its way around the history department, and it might have stayed on campus if The New York Times had not broken a story about President Bush's approval of a controversial domestic spying program.
After that story, a Standard-Times reporter called Williams, who has traveled to Afghanistan for research, to ask whether he was concerned about government surveillance, Williams said.
As an afterthought, Williams said, he told the reporter about the alleged visit by the Homeland Security agents, and that became the lead of the Dec. 17 Standard-Times story.
John Hoey, spokesman for UMass-Dartmouth, said the university did not expect to take any action against the student. ''This was a conversation that took place between a student and his faculty members," Hoey said.
Dan Rosenfeld, managing editor of the newspaper, declined to comment yesterday, saying that the paper considered it a ''competitive newspaper story."
The university issued a statement Monday defending academic freedom, but said it had had no visits from Homeland Security agents and no record of any student seeking the Mao book through an interlibrary loan.
Light Happens.
...and the web browsing experience is very good indeed. I wouldn't call it slow by any means, slightly slower than a desktop perhaps but much much faster than any other pocket/PDA browser I have ever tried.
I'd heartily recommend it.
The International Herald Tribune http://www.iht.com/, has a nice layout.
I'm involved with CommonTimes. It's a social network site for general news - and we hope taking online news in a different direction.
I'm not sure that's the issue. The article in question talks about national newspapers, not local. I agree that local papers are just cut/paste jobs, but the national papers - the NYT, WP and WSJ - have professional journalists writing for them.
"Big M" media is biased towards sensational bullshit and often leaves stories people are actually interested in or concerned about in the dust.
The site could use a comic or two, but this the next wave of news site.
Amen brother. Your last line there almost makes the parent post seem like a satire :)
On the other hand, few designers are cool enough to let their beautiful work appear any different than they intended. It's partly a carry-over from traditional media, partly an ego thing, and partly because they don't realize that if they were really good they'd be able to design a layout is both attractive and scalable. So instead they think that forcing a fixed view is a sign of being "good". (Note, I never said _I_ was a good designer!)
It's like with everything I guess... it takes decades to get "best practices" down, and even then, about half of all stuff is crap. They still make crap cars and crap light bulbs. I mean, it's come a long way in the past century, but you'd think we'd have gotten the fundamentals worked out.
Cheers.
www.iht.com
The layout of the site is the best I've seen. The text is split into three columns across the screen, but the user has the option of changing to a 'all text in one column on one page' format. There are some ads but they don't interfere with the flow of the articles.
Most importantly, the content is excellent.
Well aside from the irony of recommending a source a government has a hand in, on a government hostile site. Socialism really doesn't address the freeloader effect. It merely dilutes it, by hiding it behind the force of law. Once freeloading goes beyound a certain tipping point, even socialism will suffer consequences. And unfortunately as recent events in the EU has demonstrated. Governments, rely on force when things don't go their way.
The Memphis Daily News
Half the time I read an online article, when they mention a website, they never have a fucken link. Often they even have the website's URL slapped down but with no anchor tags around it.
No to mention the lack of multimedia such as photos, diagrams, and videos in many articles where you'd expect such a thing. Nothing more annoying than an article about some new product and the lazy fucks can't even be bothered to get a photo in.
Online newspapers haven't gotten it right because most of them are just bloody lazy.
[end of rant]
I'm not sure that's the issue. The article in question talks about national newspapers, not local. I agree that local papers are just cut/paste jobs, but the national papers - the NYT, WP and WSJ - have professional journalists writing for them.
Give me a buck and I can be a "professional journalist" too. That doesn't mean that I actually pursue what historically has been called "journalism" and nowhere is that more evident than in the national newspapers, who have all but turned into shills for corporate America. Bob Woodward is a prime example. A once respected "journalist" has now become yet another cog in a corrupted machine powered by political influence and money. This once respected reporter who broke Watergate claims to have known all along about the CIA leak and kept it quiet. He's yet another corrupted sell-out "journalist" who doesn't deserve to have a byline in a high school flyer.
What you want to read about?
What I want to read about?
Would be drowned out in a tidal wave of celebrity gossip, if newspapers actually went be what most people wanted.
Hence the Niche part.
Very nice. Yes, this is important.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Has anyone checked it out? It's PDFish. btw I like CommonTimes too - it's digg applied to the general news problem - and it's helpful when you can see what other people are reading...especially when the NY Times holds on to major Bush-spying stories for 12 months.
Generally, newspapers are written for the grade 8 reading level and offer very little in the way of background, just a quick shot of information then on to the next story
Puh-leeez...
I think you are thinking of the 6 O'clock news. No background, and the story only hits air if it is juicy and has footage. Almost no national news and no international news, unless there was a fire, earthquake or riot (and even my local stations dropped that ball for DAYS).
If you are saying that newspapers are to "stupid" for web users I have a huge problem with that. Maybe the web in 1996, but not now. For god's sake, you misspelled "newspapers". I get it that people think they are too good for the "paper" today, but don't just put down the product when you've never used it.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Actually, in the Internet age, it is so easy to obtain primary sources of information that I only use secondary sources like the press for commentary or to point out things I may have missed elsewhere, especially for political news.
For example, if a politician makes a speech that has the press in an uproar, I'll read the transcript of the entire speech or watch the video and form my own opinion, then see what the mass media has to say about it. Al Jazeera's coverage of Bush's speeches can provide quite a bit of insight into the mindset of that region of the World.
Want to know what kind of judge Samuel Alito is? Read his decisions. Want to know why the governor vetoed that bill? Read her letter to the legislature. Want to know what issues are the most important to your congressman? Look up his votes and his speeches in the congressional record. Want to know what's going on in local politics? Look up the agenda for the next town council meeting and read the minutes from the last one. Wonder how far the USA PATRIOT act goes? Read it. Want to know what the democrat or republican parties are focusing on? Read their web sites.
Think that going straight to the source is too much work? You probably already go to a lot of different secondary source web sites for information. The added bonus is that government sponsored web sites are almost always banner ad free and require no registration.
It doesn't just work for politics either. Are you going to get better coverage of the game from the 5 minutes at the end of the news or from nfl.com? Newspaper weather page or weather.com?
This space intentionally left blank.
The problem that newspapers are having "getting" the internet is similar to the problem that telephone companies had. In both cases it's a paradigm shift. Because only a few publishers could afford the information collecting, writing/editing, printing and distribution required to make a successful paper, there were a limited number of players and they felt that they owned the news. (phone companies were stuck on the message unit concept...slightly different but similar).
Murdoch, in a recent speech, talked about the News corp. investing in, and owning a portal. Yawn! If a newspaper wants to understand how the internet is changing their world, they should examine slashdot.
wherever I go, there I am.
I understand that newspapers such as the Austin American-Statesman (AAS) are increasingly concerned about declining readership. Many years ago, I read the AAS frequently. Pretty sure I was a subscriber at least some of the time, though it's so long ago that I can't really remember for sure. Therefore, I write on behalf of your lost readers, though I think I write from the 'leading edge' of that trend. My main message to you is that I see no sign of increasing attraction, either in general or as a result of today's website visit (to be addressed below). If you're waiting for me to resubscribe, I have to resort to the cliché: "Don't hold your breath."
First I'll address the general issue. Why would I want to read your newspaper? As a media organization, I think you have only two real assets: integrity and credibility. Do you speak the truth? And are you believed when you speak it? As already noted, I don't have enough recent contact with the AAS to address these assets specifically in your case, but I do think I can say that if you were doing a better job, then the AAS would have emerged visibly from the morass that is the modern MainStream Media (MSM). Since the AAS has not 'emerged' in that sense, I'm just classifying you with all the other MSM newspapers that I sample at random via recommended links to articles on their websites. In summary, the MSM rarely tells the complete truth, they often repeat unfounded and usually partisan lies, and why would I pay them for 'information' that has to be cross-checked and verified? (By the way, that even includes indirect payment via advertisers. No click-throughs from me.)
These large issues go too far afield, though I could say much more on them. Today, I visited your website for a highly specific reason, and I was quite disappointed. I should have known, but optimistic to the last, eh? The specific public issue which is troubling me is American-government-sponsored torture. The specific information I sought was a list of the Texas Representatives who joined the loser Senator Cornyn in opposing Senator McCain's legislation against torture. I do know that some of the Representatives from Texas were among the 112 members of the House that voted futilely along with Cornyn, and I want to know if my Representative from North Austin was among them. If so, I would like to start now in supporting his political opponent, though there are only a few days left to make such a donation in 2005. Perhaps the information exists somewhere in the AAS website, but I think not. I think you simply ignored the issue. Typical MSM behavior--and that's why I didn't even bother to write a "letter to the editor" on the topic. (There's also the minor reason that I am in general only an accidental reader of the AAS these years.)
My own belief is that such torture is an extremely serious matter that ought to be receiving *MUCH* more coverage. When I first read about this issue (in non-MSM sources), I was greatly offended and ashamed. I felt that I should express my outrage to the 'Senator'--who is certainly failing to represent me. I do not know if I succeeded, though I do know that I never received any response from him or from his staff. I think it most likely he never got my message because it isn't the sort of thing he wants to hear, and he has no sincere interest in representing anyone who doesn't agree with him. Cornyn's only concern is with his *LARGE* campaign donors.
Following is a copy of the message I attempted to send to Cornyn:
Your name appeared on a list of the nine Senators who opposed Senator McCain's anti-torture amendment. If that is incorrect, then please provide me with the corrected list and I will apologize. However, I think my source was reliable, and that you did vote against this amendment. Speaking specifically as an honorably discharged veteran, I wish to express my strongest displeasure and outrage at your action.
Torture does *NOT* work. It does not produce reliable information, but merely encoura
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
That's sensationalism, not Journalism. It is usually found in Tabloid-class papers.
If you want to see Journalism, try reading a newspaper-class newspaper. One example, even though it is most likely not circulating in your area, is Metro News. Even though the stories isn't in-depth, it is enough to keep a good knowledge of local, semi-local, national and international events.
They can't do massive research for everything that comes up - there is a timelimit for stories. But you can tell that there is enough information on the front page.
keep in mind though, that another reason is this: they're still trying to get used to a generation where most people get their news from online sites, like cnn.com or news.bbc.co.uk vs people actually reading a paper. and of course, image is everything, unfortunately....
if they printed it on White Copy paper not that sticky smudgy inky stuff!!
http://www.pressdisplay.com/ - Lets you read the actual print newspapers online. Google Map'ish navigation and zooming. The front page is free. If you want to read the rest, you gotta pay. It has a wide range of newspapers from around the world.
Sorry. Newspapers (and broadcast media in general) have limited resources, and generally speaking aren't going to employ paid staffers to cover niche content. It's not profitable for them, they have no incentive to cater to anything but the masses.
The solution is to accept community content for niche sites, but by doing so you do loosen journalistic standards; any niche large enough to support paid journalism can easily be fed at this time by niche publications. Why would the New York Times cover, for example, the zine community, when the zine community can (and does) cover itself? Why would the WSJ cover the Grand Rapids indie rock/music production scene?
Content of interest to few people won't be covered by most media outlets. No matter how nice it would be to hear updates on the music scene my friends are involved in these days, or read coverage in mainstream news outlets of the current developments in blind adaptive filtering, it isn't reasonable to expect that.
Niche publications will publish niche news; mainstream publications, mainstream news. The NYT has inadequate financial incentive to cover true niche content; that content is already well handle by niche publishers.
Basically, there's no good reason for them to do so, so why *would* they cover niche interests?
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
The number one problems with online newspaper is corporate ego. I know. I am the lead web developer for a major regional newspaper that will go unnamed that is owned by one of the biggest media corporations on the planet. As such, I deal with management and executives at both the local and corporate level and have to deal with utterly ridiculous egos in regard to the Web.
Newspapers are such an entrenched industry, so saturated with people who know the business inside and out that when the unknown quantity called "the Web" came along, it was largely viewed as a fad. The ego of those I work with at both a local and corporate level was stunning. The Web was too big and scary and many in the news industry preferred it just disappear and leave them alone. No such luck.
So what do the biggest media companies do when they realize that it's not only not going to go away but is also changing their business rapidly? Do they turn to those who understand and embrace this new medium? Do they reconfigure their thinking and attitudes? Do they open their arms and minds and accept what this brave new world is?
No. The ego won't allow that. Instead, they try to shoehorn the Web into their ideas of news in a print world. They fashion web sites that look and act like printed news. They refuse to accept that the Web has made obsolete some of their most fundamental assumptions about information flow and readership. They refuse to accept that the Web site is now their printing press and the old ink-and-paper concept is now in the back seat.
And that attitude doesn't work. It doesn't work at all.
You can't go back. Trying to make the Web look and work like a printed paper makes no sense and newspapers are living on borrowed time at this point. Four years ago, the news site that I work on didn't have a search engine for the daily news. I had to argue for this feature as my superiors simply couldn't grasp the idea. Why wouldn't people just scan the headlines? Why would you need a search?
And they were stunned--stunned, I tell you--when the search engine I wrote yielded a massive increase in page views.
Same for photo galleries. Same for "email this page" links. Same for print friendly features. Same for RSS feeds. Same for blah blah blah... you all get the idea. Newspaper sites are failing because they are being controlled and overseen by people who know everything about news in print and nothing about news online--and they refuse to acknowledge the latter because of ego. Simple as that.
I remember how utterly confounded some of my superiors were by Google News. They all felt certain that this insane idea was doomed to fail. Many of them still do. After all, this web thing is probably just a fad, right?
Another thing is that the paper sites ask for a lot of personal information just to register..
Golly, I wish we did not have to go down this route,but I do it for the benefit of humanity.
When you smell your depositions in the toilet bowl you are actually receiving pfeces particles in your nose.
You can safely assume that if you take your laptopto the toilet (why for bunnies sakes!) particles of your faces/urine will happily settle there, no matter how clean you keep your toilet.
There is a reason why humans dislike to be close to faeces, it is because our evolution as a species madeclear to us that is not a good idea.
If you are spending enough time in the toilet to read you should cut it short, shit quickly untilsatisfied and gte out of there.
As for tootbrushes in the same room as toilets, don't get me started....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Basically, there's no good reason for them to do so, so why *would* they cover niche interests?
Niche content would vary by paper. You're right on target when you say that the WSJ isn't going to cover the GR indie rock/music scene. Nor should they, their readers wouldn't be interested. However there are things that the WSJ *isn't* covering that their readers are interested in, and that their editors have miss or ignored. All media is niche media, in that it attempts to cater to it's audience.
What's missing here is listening to the audience.
No.
The WSJ shouldn't cover niche content; alternately, they've found their niche, and it is coverage of large scale business and financial issues. You know why? That's what their readers, as a whole, are interested in.
If there was something the majority of the WSJ's readers were interested in, they'd be covering it. The problem isn't that the news aren't covering things of majority interest; the problem is that the majority of readers areas of overlapping interests are somewhat limited. As the number of readers you have increases, the content you can conceivably cover grows more limited in nature; anything too esoteric is going to be left behind for smaller publications to pick up.
If you think media don't listen to their audiences desires as is, you're insane. They don't necessarily listen to *your* specific desires; that's not at all the same thing.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
If you think media don't listen to their audiences desires as is, you're insane. They don't necessarily listen to *your* specific desires; that's not at all the same thing.
They don't. They listen to advertisers desires. It's the advertisers who actually do market research and tell the media what they want.
For the most part, there's no difference between having the advertisers and the media doing the research. The rare difference is when an advertiser isn't comfortable with something (risque shows and family values products, etc.), or when the information in question is regarding the advertiser (cigarette toxicity reporting and the cigarette companies).
For the most part, the reporting that's done by mass media is admirably suited to the desires of the average reader. It's just that the average IQ of a conglomerate of people decreases as the number of people in the conglomerate increases.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
As a current employee of a newspaper, i can easily tell you whats wrong with current newspapers (at least in our company).
The problem is that the whole media market has been taken over by big companies. Its not a matter of providing all the news humanly possible in the correct manner anymore, it's about marketing and selling ad-space.
It always has been, but too much focus has been put on that nowadays and serious journalism is being shoved asside. More and more real journalists are getting laid off every day while these big company media powerhouses *cough*tribune*cough* rely more and more on wire feeds like Reuters and AP. Infact, theyre even currently working on consolidating our news systems even more, so instead of each individual newspaper site having its own seperate news serveer. Again, another 'cost-saving' measure to make up for the lack of ad-sales, since the bottom-line is all we're after now. All thats gonna do is leave more room for more cuts in the News and IT depts. and more data consolidation.
Newspapers havent gotten it through their skulls that being in the News industry is more than just the printed paper. But thats what they're holding on to, still thinking that that daily piece of paper is THE main news source for people in this day in age. Sounds absurd to anyone with some common sense, but that's something that's severely lacking nowadays.