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
Funny, but so true. Going through the list and seeing what I an guilty of.
While 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.
Your point about not even trying to format content for the web made me check for alt tags on your image post
Solid 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.
@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
Spot 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!
Maybe 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.
Um, 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!
Great 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.
What’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.
@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.
@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!)
Ha, 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.
Our 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!
another thing that is distracting and drives me nuts are floating ads that cover copy when scrolling..
Mostly 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).
The 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.
you 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.
*half-witted
Yes, 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.
This 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.
I 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.
It’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.”
You 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.
Great 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.
The 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.www.denverpost.com/business/ci_18451993
The Times had links. See: nyti.ms/pRtoNQ
Agreed 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.
Add 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.
Ha ha ha, love it!
Hey look: here’s one that’s not dying. www.bangordailynews.com/
There are counterexamples out there, and ironically they are sometimes the smaller presses.
No kidding. Bad UI destroys business.
Good 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:
ocsentinel.com/photos
The 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.
The 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.
I 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.
whats this got to do with the print newspaper ?
Sadly 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.
Most 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.
Main 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.
In 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.
I 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.
i 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.
Don’t forget the use of gratuitous pagination.
I 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.
All 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…
Nice. It’s relay true.
I 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
The 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.
You 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!
It’s really true and controversial. Look at discussion above. I really enjoy it!
This wa