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."
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.
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
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.
/.ers was that publishers have no right dictating the layout or what fonts are used to display the information. Making proclamations like that leads us to situations where people bitch about things looking like crap on screen. Either the publisher has a say in the presentation or they don't. Don't complain if it looks like crap when you tell them you don't want their input, though.
Remember the slashdot article a few weeks ago about choosing the perfect web font? The general consensus from
Online sites in generally haven't gotten it right. If you can't read it on the porcelein throne, it isn't perfect.
It's called a laptop and 802.11. There was a stat released recently reporting that a significant percentage of wireless networking users have taken advantage of it in the can...am I posting this post from the bathroom???? >gruntHTML 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....try getting PDFs to look good on your mobile device
You are detailing two different problems. On the one hand, there is a desire for WYSIWYG authoring with exact rendering (e.g. PDF, as you detail). On the other hand there is a desire for client-specific layouts, conveying the content while allowing for a versatile layout based upon the limitations of the target (e.g. HTML). You can't really solve both simultaneously.
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.
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.
If the ads bug you so much, why don't you just read the articles using the "Printer Friendly" mode?