Quick note: The first panel is taken from the Denver Post, not the New York Times. I didn’t notice the byline in there. The story’s author actually does a very good job of linking out to other sites
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Brad Colbow is an independent web designer and illustrator living in Cleveland Ohio. He is the owner of Colbow Design and creator of the web comic, The Brads. If you’re looking for fun and practical website design Contact Me.
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Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen
July 26, 2011 at 7:57 amFunny, but so true. Going through the list and seeing what I an guilty of.
Matthew
July 26, 2011 at 8:30 amWhile I appreciate a lot of these points and have seen them all, it is a shame that these things WILL cause a newspaper to fail instead of quality of journalism, honesty etc.
Perhaps one can only hope that the papers with a commitment to quality journalism are also the ones with a commitment to having a quality website.
Andy B
July 26, 2011 at 9:01 amYour point about not even trying to format content for the web made me check for alt tags on your image post
alexloyal
July 26, 2011 at 9:07 amSolid comic (came here via reddit). I have to agree on all accounts. What newspaper publishers don’t realize is that all of these tactics can be part of the content creation process—that little thing called journalism.
Brad Colbow
July 26, 2011 at 9:18 am@Matthew, Yeah, I’ll concede that there is way more to the success or failure of newspapers than how slick their website is.
@Andy, touché
billyadams
July 26, 2011 at 9:58 amSpot on with all of them! I live in Oklahoma City and so the auto-play example is especially near and dear to me. Keep it up!
Josain Zsun
July 26, 2011 at 10:08 amMaybe the paper is doing it’s job and the I’net side is being formatted by the boss’s relative or girlfriend that know little about HTLM and professional presentation.
FarwellRob
July 26, 2011 at 10:38 amUm, newspapers aren’t dying.
As a newspaper owner, let me just say that over the last 5 years the larget dailies in America have faced problems, but the vast majority of papers, the weeklies and semi-weeklies are doing as well as (or better) than ever.
The funny part is that this comic is missing one serious flaw in reasoning:
He is bitching about getting free news.
All of the things he points out as ‘bad’ are just different newspapers trying desperately to turn a profit while giving you something for nothing.
Stop bitching and realize that it is freaking awesome that you can get news from around the world in real time for free! We live in an awesome world!
And before you ask: No. I don’t have a website with any news on it. I believe in the old fashion business plan of charging for what people want. It works great. And if you want to read what’s in my paper, it’s available for the week on the newsstand or by subscription!
Sean
July 26, 2011 at 10:46 amGreat points. I think it comes from most TV/news media seeing their website as real estate for more ad space, similar to how classified ads work. It’s a bad experience for visitors who just get annoyed by all the clutter.
DigitalWheelie
July 26, 2011 at 10:47 amWhat’s worse is that they seem to feel their half-assed web presence will save the printed versions. “Why are we losing so much $$? Why are so few people buying our paper? I mean, we HAVE a webs site!”
Yeesh.
Brad Colbow
July 26, 2011 at 10:56 am@FarewellRob, I actually didn’t include a lot of practices that are directly related to their profit model like all the obnoxious flash ads etc. because I am aware that news needs to be paid for.
My gripe is bigger. I pay for my local newspaper, I pay for a subscription to Time magazine, I PAY FOR NEWS. I’m happy to pay for news. But the current online editions of newspapers are far inferior to their print counterparts for many of the reasons outlined above.
Print sales are down (at least that’s what I’ve read) and if newspapers want to evolve they have to move online and that requires them to put quality over all these gimmicky SEO, page view goofball tactics.
FarwellRob
July 26, 2011 at 11:13 am@Brad Colbow: You are correct that online editions of newspapers are inferior to their print versions.
When the leap from print to internet started, many publishers thought that it would mean a huge increase in revenue. That advertisers would pay the paper twice; once for print and once for web.
They quickly learned that it doesn’t work that way. Especially in smaller markets. Businesses generally go with one or the other… and it goes further than that. In the past when you bought a newspaper ad, you paid for the eyes of everyone who reads the local news. Now, if you bought a print ad, it didn’t reach the web readers.
It led many advertisers to just stop advertising.
In smaller markets where the internet-newspaper hybrid has been either rare, or non-existant, papers are doing great.
My paper is around 20 subscribers off our all-time high. And considering we are in a recession, I’d call that pretty darn strong.
As for print sales being down, sure, if you give away the content, you will lose a pretty good number of subscribers.
I’d actually say that if newspapers want to evolve, they need to do what has gotten them this far: Go back to local coverage in a print-only product. It sucks for those who want free content, but it protects both the paper, and more importantly, the advertisers.
Or at most, offer the paper in near original form to iPad type readers. In other words: If an advertiser buys an ad, it is shown in it’s original static form to both web readers and print readers.
And that way you don’t have to worry about flash, popups or any other problems.
Newspapers aren’t perfect, but their mission is simple: Cover local news. That is something most folks can’t get anywhere else. And that is a valuable commodity.
(I have now written this with several breaks in between, soI should take the time to edit, but sorry, it’s a work day!)
Beth
July 26, 2011 at 11:17 amHa, this is incredibly timely! I am tempted to pimp my company here hahaha. Really it’s true though, people are happy to pay for a news experience that doesn’t make their eyeballs bleed.
Bigger publications have an advantage over the smaller syndicates, because the regional papers are usually stuck on whatever nasty CMS their gigantic parent company foists upon them.
I believe people aren’t going to *truly* enjoy reading online though until the publications really leverage the capabilities of the web instead of just dumping their content into some templates with a few RSS feeds or trying to jam PDF scans into some kind of iPad reader.
Deb
July 26, 2011 at 12:27 pmOur newspaper doesn’t do any of those issues outlined above - we have an e-edition that is just like the newspaper with links to websites in our advertisers ads. We are also a paid subscription site! We are thriving!
poppaneedsanap
July 26, 2011 at 1:02 pmanother thing that is distracting and drives me nuts are floating ads that cover copy when scrolling..
Mark
July 26, 2011 at 1:07 pmMostly good points, but I have to take issue with a couple:
“Putting 300 share buttons all over the page”. Well, yes, if they actually did that, but I counted eight in your example. That’s not excessive, particularly since a lot of users find these very helpful. And getting more publicity and inbound links is precisely the sort of thing that stops newspaper websites from dying.
“Your content takes up less than 20% of the page”. The same applies to this page, if you apply the same criteria and exclude headers, headlines, navigation and comments. But these are things you can hardly exclude; the navigation needs to go somewhere on the page, each article has a headline and there’s nothing wrong with giving the site an overall visual design via a standard header. And keeping the main body of the text fairly narrow is good usability practice; it gets hard to read if the line lengths are too long. So that leaves plenty of screen real estate; you might as well use it for links to related content and adverts (which, after all, are the one thing that, if not present, really will kill the site stone dead).
SEO Agencies
July 26, 2011 at 2:37 pmThe problem is that news is a commodity, so newspapers have to monetize every single view. Which means turning content to whatever is popular, to get even more views.
I’d gladly pay $50 a month to get news that is a) simply news and b) isn’t modified to save the big advertiser from embarrassment.
ebpp
July 26, 2011 at 2:49 pmyou missed the most important annoyance, breaking down a story into 30 pages just to drive page views.
or images, each image is on it’s own page.
Ted Strong
July 26, 2011 at 2:56 pm*half-witted
Absurdity
July 26, 2011 at 3:38 pmYes, those are issues but the main reason is they refuse to do the investigative work instead opting for profit. Only now they all have competition and very few are willing to spend the cash to protect our country/democracy. I truly believe that had they made themselves a place where people could keep tabs on the real issues rather than a coupon rag they’d have plenty of readers more than willing to pay for the service.
Nicole/MadlabPost
July 26, 2011 at 3:43 pmThis is a humorous, yet pretty accurate description of newspaper practices. The social media/sharing buttons, pop-ups and lack of web content that is easier to read ( especially on mobile devices) are among the most annoying habits of them all.
Craig Pittman
July 26, 2011 at 3:59 pmI think you’re confusing “this is why newspaper website designs aren’t pleasing to use” with “nobody wants to buy your ad space or read your stories.” Actually, despite all these design flaws, newspaper online ad sales are up. It’s the print ads that aren’t bringing in the revenue the way they used to.
Erik Gable
July 26, 2011 at 4:01 pmIt’s more than a bit of a stretch to say that a bunch of what are basically somebody’s web design pet peeves could be responsible for the demise of an industry, so I’m going to assume the title of the entry was tongue-in-cheek. (Because, really? Share buttons and thumbnails that link to the same size image are THAT powerful?)
The first two are definitely problems—I’ve seen “continued from 1A” randomly show up in an online story before, and there’s no surer way to demonstrate that your website is nothing but a copy-and-paste version of your print product—but most of the others are akin to saying “News of the World got shut down because they used a bad font for their body copy” or “circulations are dropping because too many newspapers have Helvetica headlines.”
Jeanne Devlin
July 26, 2011 at 4:07 pmYou have a point about the links, etc., but please newspaper websites don’t follow his design idea. A headline doesn’t give you enough intro into an article—and design also needs to prioritize material for you so your eye knows where to start ... where to go next ... etc. That’s why the new USA Today website design (which has been slowly eating up sections on the website bit by bit) makes me crazy. I don’t spend half the time I used to spend, when I could graze down the right column and read headline, start of story ... packaging of content that has worked for eons! God save us for websites where everything is in same darn size of font and boxed shoulder to shoulder like some terrible food label.
Dan Richey
July 26, 2011 at 4:22 pmGreat infographic. Some of these are humorous to me, however most of it is accurate in my opinion. I like when newspapers have a mobile site for their readers that like to read on their mobile devices.
Damon Darlin
July 26, 2011 at 4:24 pmThe article from the New York Times on boating apps you use in the cartoon did not appear on the Times site in that form. It is from the Denver Post.http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_18451993
The Times had links. See: http://nyti.ms/pRtoNQ
Mike Suchcicki
July 26, 2011 at 4:40 pmAgreed with @Erik Gable. Most of these gripes can apply to just about any info-distribution site (i.e., stand-alone news services, journalistic blogs, etc.) out there, not just newspaper sites. These are design elements that newspaper sites should address, sure, but they are hardly threatening an industry. Besides, compare today with the state of newspapers-on-the-Web of 10 years ago. Evolution isn’t always pretty or smooth. This isn’t the newspaper industry in the process of dying. This is just Tuesday.
RochWebDesigner
July 26, 2011 at 4:46 pmAdd to the gripes missing or poor “print” styles so that attempting to print an article results in junk or text obliterated by ads, headers or footers.
Wikiminster
July 26, 2011 at 7:35 pmHa ha ha, love it!
Matt Perry
July 26, 2011 at 7:44 pmHey look: here’s one that’s not dying. http://www.bangordailynews.com/
There are counterexamples out there, and ironically they are sometimes the smaller presses.
Jason Gerard Clauss
July 26, 2011 at 9:52 pmNo kidding. Bad UI destroys business.
Jesse Nahan
July 26, 2011 at 10:09 pmGood points all around. I’ve seen plenty of those sites. Some Newspapers are working hard to get it right and serve their community online in different ways, My brother’s newspaper in Ocean City, NJ uses their site both for articles and to show many thousands of photos that would never fit into their print edition. So instead of hoping that your kid made it into the one or two game pictures in the paper, you can scroll through loads of photos and see if your kid is in them:
http://ocsentinel.com/photos
Carmen Boles
July 26, 2011 at 10:42 pmThe link you mention isn’t “random” - it’s directly related to the story. The screenshot is from a site we built to facilitate community conversation and non-traditional news around an area of interest in Colorado (the outdoors). A year later, outtherecolorado.com is a huge readership and revenue success.
Carmen Boles
July 26, 2011 at 10:42 pmThe link you mention isn’t “random” - it’s directly related to the story. The screenshot is from a site we built to facilitate community conversation and non-traditional news around an area of interest in Colorado (the outdoors). A year later, outtherecolorado.com is a huge readership and revenue success.
AJones
July 26, 2011 at 11:29 pmI don’t see what this has to do with newspapers at all. You seem to be griping about common failings of websites. How do sloppy websites endanger newspapers? I don’t get it.
Bakasura
July 27, 2011 at 12:17 amwhats this got to do with the print newspaper ?
JPMajor
July 27, 2011 at 12:20 amSadly it’s true… on the first note, I had recently had an article written about me that mentioned my website. I asked that the online version have the name of the site hotlinked. The writer checked with her editor, who basically said “the name of the site is good enough”. Mm-hmm.
Nathan
July 27, 2011 at 12:53 amMost of those commenting in defense of newspapers are missing the central point:
In a quest to monetize Web real estate through ads, gimmicks and quick-and-dirty CMS layouts, newspapers are missing out on the payoff of the optimal user experience.
Newspapers: Get the user experience right, and READERS WILL PAY YOU MONEY.
As a caveat to this, everyone has to do their job well. Crappy writing will drive you out of business even if you have a stellar website. But the website still matters—or, it should.
HBarca
July 27, 2011 at 12:56 amMain reason all these illustrate why newspapers are dying: That newspapers put their content out there for free in the first place. Without free newspaper content, internet websites would be deserts, swiss cheese and gasbags. Too late to fix that original dumbass move.
RoguePhotographer
July 27, 2011 at 1:17 amIn reply to @SEOAgency:
“Which means turning content to whatever is popular, to get even more views.”
We call that Click Whoring where I come from, and it breeds bastard stepchildren such as photo galleries of the movie stars, coverage of the latest titillating story of the day, and drowns out coverage of actual news.
“I’d gladly pay $50 a month to get news that is a) simply news”
Good! So we can throw away all the SEO crap and forget about being click whores? Can we get back to the business of covering the news? Thank you, and make sure to encourage all your friends to follow suit and subscribe.
“b) isn’t modified to save the big advertiser from embarrassment.”
If you have evidence that any newspaper worth its nameplate does this, you should speak up. Making half-assed, non-specific comments like this only feeds the steady erosion of credibility.
Nick Taylor
July 27, 2011 at 1:46 amI wouldn’t pay for news that doesn’t treat me like an imbecile…
... or more accurately, who doesn’t want me to share the news.
I’ve punted money to The Real News… but they don’t mementicaly cripple their output. So no… paywall? forget it.
logan
July 27, 2011 at 2:21 ami love read the newspaper,it make me happy than read it in front the screen,but informatization is coming,traditional media will face the shockwave.if the newspaper can keep the depth,it can keep moving.
William
July 27, 2011 at 2:28 amDon’t forget the use of gratuitous pagination.
Graeme Pietersz
July 27, 2011 at 2:33 amI have blogged about this, but its worth amention here. The biggest problem is the quality of the content. Investigative journalism is dead, even proper fact checking is regarded as too expensive, and a lot of the content is just regurgitated press releases. There is nothing of value there.
Jason C. Levine
July 27, 2011 at 2:45 amAll I want is good electronic version of my local paper that isn’t edited down or a small slice of the total stories. I am completely willing to pay a subscription fee to get this. But I will not subscribe to the print editions any longer…
Dhaval Pathak
July 27, 2011 at 3:09 amNice. It’s relay true.
Martin Graz
July 27, 2011 at 3:19 amI hate those newspaper websites, that have big headings like they do in their printed versions. online doesn’t work like print. no need to draw attention with 120px headlines
Yuri Victor
July 27, 2011 at 3:44 amThe last one “Randomly cramming things into a template” is my fault. I forgot to commit the new video size template. It was corrected. Sorry for the problem.
Matthew Fedak
July 27, 2011 at 3:52 amYou forgot to mention weather widgets too! all the crappy newspaper sites have weather widgets all over the place too as if we can’t just turn round and look out the window!
Blucorner
July 27, 2011 at 4:06 amIt’s really true and controversial. Look at discussion above. I really enjoy it!
John Robinson
July 27, 2011 at 4:43 amThis was interesting reading, my local paper (which by coincidence is owned by News Limited) could benefit from returning to a user pays model, pretty hard to value a newspaper that’s free and full of ads just for a small handful of news :-(
Kate
July 27, 2011 at 4:56 amWeb editors and journalists: completely different beasts. Journalists don’t even sub their own work; they’re paid to originate content, not finesse it. Sadly, many big organisations still fail to recognise what skilled web content professionals can do.
expert
July 27, 2011 at 5:09 amThe latest WSJ redesign is pretty impressive to me. I guess some of them might still survive.
Brad Colbow
July 27, 2011 at 7:15 amThere are too many great comments here for me to reply to them all but I do want to address one thing, the idea that these are just a bunch of design gripes, or my personal preferences.
I picked out all these things because I felt like they put gimmicky SEO tricks or page views above the experience of the user. These tactics feel like a cheap way to drive traffic instead of brand loyalty.
All these tactics point to one thing: They care more about page views than the actual human reading the site. It’s true most people will not pay for news because it’s a commodity but I think there is a large number of people who would pay for news, myself included.
This is true in any industry. Look at Starbucks, look at Apple. They are selling product for 4 times more than their competitors yet people buy them. Why? It’s all about the user’s experience, they are buying more than just something that works.
In they end your customers will treat you the way you treat them. If you’re doing the things I outlined above it means you care more about churning out content than building brand loyalty and you will always be chasing short term traffic instead of a long term community that be loyal to your paper.
TerraHertz
July 27, 2011 at 7:28 amThose are all merely annoyances, and only to those reading for free on the net at that. None of them are the primary reason print news media are losing readership like someone shot in an artery and bleeding out.
It’s simple. Average people are realizing the mainstream media LIE. They lie all the time, in concert, to an agenda, and shamelessly.
That’s why nobody wants to pay for MSM ‘news’ anymore.
http://everist.org/archives/links/!_MSM_control_links.txt
Frank
July 27, 2011 at 7:32 amGreat article, that’s all points that make me leave that website as fast as i can.
And the cartoon is ironic but true.
Thanks,
Frank
Slotwell Creampuff
July 27, 2011 at 7:49 amThe mega korps that own most media are quite happy with the pitiful state they have reduced it to. Their dream is to make all people on the planet poor and willing to work for scraps while they eat butter in their gated communities. The decline is accelerating.
José Carréra
July 27, 2011 at 8:12 amReally nice! Very clear!
tcr
July 27, 2011 at 8:20 amGreat points…
For me, an alternative blog title would be “why I hit the ReadItLater (add to Instapaper) button”
Strips all but the article text, and it’s stored for offline reading. A good readability plugin will do the same to the page in realtime.
Mike Cane
July 27, 2011 at 8:24 amThey are also the slowest-loading pages on the Net because they cram so much Flash ad crap into them. By the time the page is loaded, the news has already changed!
Robert Andrews
July 27, 2011 at 8:49 amNone of these are the reason newspapers are dying.
Kris Gosser
July 27, 2011 at 8:54 amLove the inclusion of JSonline! So true!
Typhon
July 27, 2011 at 9:22 amRather the reason why newspaper websites suck.
Typhon
danny
July 27, 2011 at 10:37 amI heartily agree, you last comment regarding user experience really hits the nail on the head. Also, thank the heavens for safari reader.
Rosendo Cuyasen
July 27, 2011 at 10:50 amWell you have a good point of view. But I think newspapers are still used in our country especially to some remote areas.
Mr Ford
July 27, 2011 at 10:56 amExcellent points, especially about not re-formatting content for the web. Perhaps they should write it once with a view to publishing it on multiple channels, including mobile?
Rand
July 27, 2011 at 12:56 pmThis has nothing to do with newspapers proper. Many newspaper websites do have this problem but that’s comparing apples and digital oranges. Catchy headline though even if it’s incorrect.
versak
July 27, 2011 at 1:57 pmdon’t forget all the mouseover ads that popup when you scroll down to the article and your mouse accidentally hovers over the double underlined links.
CAMorris
July 27, 2011 at 2:12 pmI agree with Rand. The headline on this story should be ‘Why most newspaper websites suck”, not “Why Newspapers are Dying.” I’ve been a print journalist for 20-plus years and have worked with our websites when they began to roll out at the various papers I’ve been at. The print journalists wanted to produce quality journalism. After that, the content was available to the web team(s) and most times, it was repackaged for online delivery. Of late, quality headlines were replaced with SEO-drivers and other digital pheromones that weren’t there at the origin of the story. The panels above are amusing, and true to a great extent. But I think the fault over the years has been not with the intent of the journalist on the front end but rather the PT Barnum shenanigans on the back end to drive traffic. More often than not it’s a technical design issue, not a journalism issue. Columbia J School grad meets Art Institute grad.
DW
July 27, 2011 at 4:22 pm@CAMorris, I think you’re echoing the problem. Terms like “SEO drivers” and “digital pheromones” smacks of the “we don’t really fu** with digital” crap that’s driving the industry down. Not only should SEO be happening, REPORTERS should be making it happen - not some digital team.
True enough, every journalist is not a web developer or anything like that. But more often, media websites need to be operating with CMS that enables reporters and editors to file to the ‘net; there’s no reason to have an entire team available to put some sh*t on a glorified WordPress. The resistance to learning/changing/merging - there’s the problem.
@FarewellRob, I implore you to tell us the name of this magically thriving newspaper - the Unicorn Gazette? The Rainbow Tribune? lol
-Sincerely: A reporter
C. Stone
July 27, 2011 at 4:43 pmThis isn’t really why newspapers are dying at all. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the slickest, most well-designed newspaper websites are COSTING their parent company money, not making it money. The real problems were 1) giving away all the news for free to begin with, and 2) not coming up with any way to compete—or at least play defense—when things like Craigslist, Match.com, Monster.com and other sites made their old business model obsolete.
Yes, sites should look good and drive traffic, but for the most part nobody’s figured out how to turn visits into dollars (significant dollars, not the chump change you get from Google Ads).
papicek
July 27, 2011 at 5:39 pmAutoplay videos, especially the ads, get my vote for Worst Idea Ever.
mattheww
July 27, 2011 at 8:46 pmYou left out the box of intriguing-sounding “news stories” that are actually sleazy advertisements. See the LA Times and their “What’s This?” box. I love “What’s This?” You have to click it to get even then a soft-pedaled indication the answer is “ads.” The frigging NY Times even has such a box.
I know they’re common throughout the web, but when a newspaper site contains a whole section devoted to fake news stories attempting to mislead the reader, it goes beyond the annoying and into credibility-destruction.
m
July 27, 2011 at 9:24 pmMinor but annoying: an excess of unnecessary stupid links. Example from the New York Times today in a story about Happy Meals: “Bowing to pressure from health advocates and parents, McDonald’s is putting the Happy Meal on a diet.”—Both “McDonald’s” and “diet” were hotlinked to NYT articles that explained these abstruse terms. A few paragraphs later, the word “obesity” was linked. Who needs this? Are there people who don’t know what these words mean?
Sometimes it’s worse: if a person’s name is also a word or if a place-name contains a word, there may be a link to an article that is 100% irrelevant, sort of like a bad pun.
Kim
July 28, 2011 at 12:00 amSurely all these things about websites, which are not newspapers, drive people to read newspapers, not the websites? Hence, they are actually reasons why people should stick with newspapers?
Signed,
A newspaper feature writer
bigmike
July 28, 2011 at 3:25 amYes, your points are all true. A newspaper should present news, as the actual facts of the matter, a comment as to how the story is relevant to other events can be helpful. Modern newspapers, both print and online, fail to give ALL the facts, and then SPIN, what you should think about the story. Fact checking is also sluffed off. To pharaphrase Michael Crichton,“it’s the quality, stupid”. People will pay for quality, if you give people the PROMISE of good quality, you can ride along on that for awhile, but if you don’t then give them good quality, it’ll eventually bite you on the ass! PROPAGANDA DOESN’T SELL, you have to force people to buy it!
Claus
July 28, 2011 at 4:50 amJounalist offers content for free
Nice try, but chronologically not correct. In fact, it is like this:
Colbow consumes News on Website for free
Journalist produces bad Website and doesn’t improve it corresponding to new develpments (because he is underpaid/not paid at all)
Colbow: Look how bad the Website is - no wonder you don’t get any money for that
Website (and the Quality newspaper that used to back it financially) dies.
Colbow: I knew it
David
July 28, 2011 at 4:54 am@m - this is america, if the word is longer than 4 letters, half the population won’t know what it is
@news paper defenders - you MISSED the class on; deliver quality and your consumers will buy. instead, you deliver crap, and have to flood us with gimmicks to scrape by on. we build gimmick blockers, you try harder to punch us in the face with crap we don’t want to see. we build better blockers and you get cranky and foam at the mouth about all of us “freeloaders”. “freeloaders” that have repeatedly said we’ll pay for quality content - and do.
news is an ultra light commodity. these days an event circles the world in minutes. social media sites beat you hands down for distribution. and as wild and inaccurate as reports can get, they’re corrected more quickly than your newspapers. your news articles are often just as factually flawed - but rarely get corrected. further, the majority of your “news” is that britney spears farted at some gas station today and linday lohan blinked her eyes. seriously, make a drooling fanboy section to punt all that stuff to.
i won’t every buy another print newspaper. it’s a waste of paper, it’s huge and bulky. my phone fits in my pocket along with my car keys and i can read it entirely at my leisure.
for print, i’m only interested in one, maybe two stories if any. by the time it hit print it’s a day old anyway and the entire world is thoroughly versed in it.
since we can get it much faster online from elsewhere, and free, what’s the incentive? the incentive is a reliable news site that does fact checking in their investigative reporting. believe it or not, people like reading accurate and thoroughly covered stories. it’s the quality. make it, and i’ll buy it.
don’t put a website up that makes me install ad blockers, flash blockers, javascript blockers, inline frame blockers and et cetera. if you make the site so offensive to visit, i just won’t visit. believe me, you aren’t that important. someone else will have the story.
why do you think people block all that stuff? they aren’t interested in it! they don’t want it! it’s probably entirely NOT relevant to them! is it really necessary to annoy 99% of a page’s readers with an ad for tampons, just to get a few women that would actually end up buying some?
don’t try to force me to buy something. appeal to me with quality.
Joshua P White
July 28, 2011 at 9:40 am@FarewellRob “protects both the paper, and more importantly, the advertisers.” I think they should be more focused on giving news not advertisements.
@Mark Having the content on the page concealed in a hierarchy system is different than splaying all the information out at one time. Expandable links and other things can be used to help make things compact and readable.
Bradley
July 28, 2011 at 9:57 amOur local paper is guilty of some of these (the local TV news does it too!). This is not what is killing our local paper in my opinion. The lack of local reporting is killing it. Mostly they run AP stories that I can get anywhere, and for free.
Now they have put up a paywall to protect the 2 or 3 local stories they run per week. Not sure they will survive. Meh. Not much of a loss from what I can see.
JPB
July 28, 2011 at 10:08 amYou left off unmoderated commenting. My newspaper elicits comments from the most uneducated, mouth-breathing, neanderthals in town. Comments are full of spam, misspellings, xenophobic rantings and downright libel, all anonymously posted of course.
Why newspapers don’t edit with the same discretion on internet commenting that they do for their own letters to the editor page, I’ll never understand.
Ryan Cash
July 28, 2011 at 11:23 amAnother HUGE complaint I’d like to add to Brad’s list is when these websites draw a story out over 10 pages.
Welcome to the Internet – a place where physical pages don’t exist, and there’s no such thing as “no space left”. There is absolutely NO REASON for any story to span over more than one single page.
This is especially annoying when they’re showing a series of photographs. Why can’t they all be displayed on one page? At the very least make it a clickable slideshow within one page, and not load a completely new page for each new photo. Jeeze.
http://ryancash.net/post/8131787194/why-traditional-newspapers-fail-online
Joe
July 28, 2011 at 2:00 pm@David, yes, yes, and more yes.
This is the truth here people, read David’s comment if you want to understand the real point being made here. Quality drives loyalty, which drives revenue.
Reybo
July 28, 2011 at 9:27 pmRollovers! They make sites ever so much harder to use and there’s no good reason to use them. And page timers to bounce you to another page before you finished reading. With a Mac, these timers give us about 10 seconds. Media General probably has the lamest sites in news-dom.
Reybo
July 28, 2011 at 9:43 pmWait a second! These aren’t -newspaper- gaffes. They are NEWS SITE errors, and are at least as bad on TV station web sites as newspaper sites. As I see it, TV stations are even less sophisticated than newspapers at creating a useful web page. One annoyance peculiar to TV pages: “Click here for the rest of the news.” And when you do, there are the SAME stories you just saw. Nothing new at all. And to TV, one or two paragraphs is all you get about most items. For the full story you need to see the newspaper site.
And don’t forget the fraud ads running down the right side of the page on most news sites and every Legacy obits page. Two weeks ago there was a major expose of these weight loss and miracle cure frauds which have bilked tens of thousands of readers out of million$. Did any media web site stop running them? None I visit. They are still there.
T
July 29, 2011 at 4:05 amThis is a really good usability overview. You may want to rephrase: “this is why your readers will go elsewhere” ? - not sure, but I agree with you 100%
T
July 29, 2011 at 4:08 amBTW Safari’s ‘Reader’ function strips out just the text on any website, very efficiently, to solve nearly all of the problems in question.
George Dina
July 29, 2011 at 4:40 amSad because is true.
There are too many ads in online news sites.
Too many pop-ups, too little space for content.
Craig McLaughlan
July 29, 2011 at 4:44 amFunny but poignant article and some great responses. I feel sorry for the major newspapers; their business model is collapsing before their eyes and to date, there are few that are able to do anything about it (WSJ, etc.). Revenues are down so they want to spend less on ‘real’ journalism so 99% of content is off Reuters, AAP, etc.
Making a buck out of ads on a website is a very tough gig, and most of their websites seem to be run by clueless managers and SEOers of similar standing. SEO has been around for a little over 10 years, its a relatively new profession, training is non-existent and the rules are not widely known. It has attracted its share of snakeoil merchants and the incompetent, and has done little to try to improve standards compared to, say, the life coaching sector which has had a similar lifespan.
But we aren’t all clueless twats and that should be obvious at the discovery stage.
Pat
July 30, 2011 at 10:23 pmYou hit it on the spot Brad. It seems that I’m guilty as well. Sorry newspaper companies.
'witz
August 3, 2011 at 12:32 pmThis is a good compilation of just about everything that’s wrong with newspaper websites, but I see nobody mentioning that the papers are so desperate for revenue that they’ll sell anything advertisers will buy, no matter how annoying to readers. As for the lack of updating and good re-formatting from paper to Internet, how many newspapers still have enough qualified staff to do that even halftime, never mind fulltime?
Schneid
August 3, 2011 at 4:04 pmAnd people wonder why Drudge drives more traffic than any other website, including Facebook and Twitter? It is because it is the optimal user experience for reading news. Headlines, directly to the full article.
longemius
August 4, 2011 at 12:10 amI recently stepped into the design lead for one of the biggest CMS providers for media in the US. Trust me, we’re definitely aware and we’re working on it. Big corporations mean things take time - moving print, TV and radio online (efficiently and not using retrofitted models). This is like teaching uncle scrooge what the internet is, it’s going to take time - and he’s looking to squeeze every dime out meanwhile.
This is news for free, and your local news stations and papers are trying their best to keep you informed. We are seeing a rise in paywalls and clients are starting to provide dedicated staff (gasp) to maintaining their websites appearance and load time.
Paper’s aren’t dying - just give them a sec to catch up. Meanwhile enjoy free content.
Check this article out for other good points on news related design… http://andyrutledge.com/news-redux.php
pellet mill
August 17, 2011 at 11:13 pmRead David’s comment if you want to understand the real point being made here. Quality drives loyalty, which drives revenue. Our local paper is guilty of some of these (the local TV news does it too!). This is not what is killing our local paper in my opinion. The lack of local reporting is killing it. Mostly they run AP stories that I can get anywhere, and for free.
baboon
August 19, 2011 at 9:39 amDon’t forget the fraud ads running down the right side of the page on most news sites and every Legacy obits page. Two weeks ago there was a major expose of these weight loss and miracle cure frauds which have bilked tens of thousands of readers out of million$
cincinnati web design
August 24, 2011 at 7:22 amwell, love to read through your article. Newspapers are useful and thus needs quality content that would drive readers to read it through.
elzapp
August 24, 2011 at 9:03 am#10) Nonsense linkbait headlines
Payment Processing
August 25, 2011 at 12:21 pmThis is all too true. There are too many ads in online news sites. Too many pop-ups, too little space for content.
Fire Sprinklers
September 10, 2011 at 4:33 pmValid points but i have to disagree to an extent! Firstly, there is a tradition in reading the paper that will not be surpassed by using the net. Secondly, holding and reading a paper is different from only reading single pages off a screen. There will definitely be less papers but they will not die out completely!!
Marcus Barber
September 20, 2011 at 2:38 amOne thing missing from your list is ‘Making it seem like everything is going down the tube!’ The rampant negativity of almost every front page, and almost every page there after fails to comprehend that the reality of the world is ‘Good News Sells’. People WANT positive stories (not the syrupy style) but good quality ‘well done to them’ stories. Instead they shove ‘doom and gloom’. It might attract eyeballs to the headline, but we all now know what the body copy is and won’t need to read further