dummied

Getting it right

At a glance

This entry was written on November 11, 2005.

The entry prior to this is entitled The Technical Details.

The entry following this is entitled Full-frontal content.

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This entry has been tagged as Blogs, Newspapers, Recommended, Work.

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So, I've talked a lot so far about what newspaper companies do wrong when they stumble toward the digital age.

Is anybody doing things right?

Well, nobody's 100-percent there, but a few are at least starting to shamble toward the right path.

The closest I've been able to find in my travels is the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C. They've got a doctype (XHTML 1.0 Strict, no less), blogs and podcasts (both a little gimmicky, but whatever) and a table-less layout as far as I can tell. The site doesn't validate, but it's such a good effort at "getting it" that I'm willing to forgive that.

One of the only issues I have with the N&R is its decision to charge for the full text of their archives. Keeping the stories online as far back as 1990 is certainly impressive, but it would be much more-so if they fully bought in and put all of that up for free (people can't see ads on pages they're not allowed to see).

Best in show

The homepage of the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C.

The design itself is not great shakes, but it's different and really pretty light-loading as far as newspaper websites go.

It bothers me a little bit that newspapers feel that just by adding blogs to their website, they somehow get it. Adding separate blogs are a nice step. Realizing that a newspaper website is a blog is getting it. Add comments to stories (have the reporter moderate his or her own story if need be ... trust me, they're on the internet all the time anyway), add trackbacks to stories, open up every window of interaction with your content, and that's fucking getting it.

Everything else is just counting degrees of half-assed.

Everybody else aside from the News & Record?

Well ...

The newspapers that have RSS feeds get an 'A' for effort. It's a step in the right direction, especially since summary RSS feeds are essentially advertisements for webpages. I mean, a synonym for RSS feeds is "news feeds," which practically screams "newspaper website."

The thing that's a little troubling about that list, though, is that there doesn't seem to be a pattern to it. There are a handful of Knight Ridder properties with RSS and a few Gannett ones, but by and large, there doesn't appear to be a cohesive web plan at a lot of media companies and rather a mix-and-match patchwork quilt of policies across the country. That says to be me that a lot of corporate offices either a) don't know anything about the web, b) don't care about the web or c) are scared of the web.

As I've already alluded to, those are three things newspaper companies can't afford to do much longer.

For the time being, newspapers still have some tie to their community, but it's weakening with every teenager who's getting their news from Yahoo or Newsvine (coming soon), their classifieds from Craigslist, their local entertainment listings from Upcoming.org and their sports from ESPN.com. And every one of those has an RSS feed that drops fresh copy on their digital doorstep the moment it's published.

If you can get all that a) for free and b) delivered with an absolute minimum of fuss, why are you going to mess around with registration screens and expiring content?

Or cheap newsprint and inconsiderate delivery boys for that matter.

The goal of a newspaper website should be to make it as easy, transparent and worry-free as possible for users to get to the content that want and it should be as targetted, transparent and worry-free as possible for advertisers to reach those users.

For god's sakes, if people are making money off blogs and Google's AdSense, why can't newspapers?

It boggles my mind (and forces me to go off on tangents) that producers of what I feel is still the best content on the web half-ass things this badly.

It's almost as if they just don't get it. You can't charge for this, because people can get it for free. You can't make people register, because that just means less people look at it. You can't control it at all, or you run into print piracy, which means other people are making money off your content. The internet and its users will always find the cheapest, easiest way to get their content and newspapers have to get their head out of the sand and become the cheapest, easiest way for users to get the content the newspaper already produces ...

Before somebody else does it for them.