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.
...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.
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.
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.
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 - }
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.
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......)
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."
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
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...
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 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!
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
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 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
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]