Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
citylab.com
Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
1–10 of 189 posts
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#2Building a newspaper business for the digital age is a hard problem that has yet to be solved.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#3I think people want it. I do not think most news sites will reach the same number of visitors after passing a good interface. maybe people like horrible interfaces. yes i am joking. maybe i don't not.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#4I actually did some freelance website development for a local newspaper website around 15 years ago. I can't speak for larger newspapers, this was my experience with a much smaller one. The biggest challenges I found were:
1. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering department.
2. They wanted the website to "feel" more like a real newspaper, including things like incorporating custom layout, design and other elements on the website. Explaining the limitations of HTML, CSS and Javascript was a bit ... frustrating for both sides.
3. Too many opinions on what the website should look like. Ditto for even small features such as what the photo gallery and subscription pages should look like.
4. Too many feature requests, often contradicting each other. It wasn't clear who was in charge of making decisions on website changes.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#5Newspapers slit their own throats back in 1994-5 or so when they decided to put their content up for free because they could sell ad space. It was a bad idea then, and I don't think anyone's tried to fix it in the past 25 years.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#6One large component is the inability of these companies to calculate the cost of the adtech on their pages.
They simply don’t have anyone who can measure the negative impact of slowing page speed, obscuring articles, increasing comics rate, scrolling jankiness, etc.
The adtech providers optimize around ease of install (one line of JavaScript!) over any costs that will entail for customers.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#7I worked for a media conglomerate for several years on several high volume media sites. The GMs and POs that I came across often had a great sense for what made user experiences great, but those would take a back seat every single time for revenue opportunities. A company wants to do an ad takeover for the sites and slather sidebars/banners/popups everywhere, Ad Ops wants to sell a new module in the right rail, Outbrain/Taboola/whatever wants to pay you to throw their script and "suggested" stories at the bottom of the page - of course you jump at the chance to do any of these because the revenue can easily be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
Every time an AMP thread comes up, there is a minority being positive and trying to find a way to make it work, and it's for the reasons mentioned above. Apple and Facebook want walled gardens where they control the content and give the providers whatever revenue they consider "fair", with the huge benefit that the stories would be fast to load and provide a friendly, uniform interface. AMP is the only reasonable alternative I've seen pitched since RSS has essentially died.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#8It's funny how they scream "free media", "support us", "internet is dying", while the core content of an article is perhaps 2-4kb of text. That's how they react when being cut off from income from tracking and advertising providers. They monetize the 2kb of text till the last drop of blood at the cost of privacy of their visitors.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#9Advance Local Media owns a lot of newspaper companies online presence. Their software is terrible, there are so many ads the content doesn’t load half the time.... plus with all the cutbacks over the last few years the actual articles are garbage. No details, bad writing, spelling errors, street names that are wrong, nobody proofread a these days.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#10I actually did some freelance website development for a local newspaper website around 15 years ago. I can't speak for larger newspapers, this was my experience with a much smaller one. The biggest challenges I found were: 1. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering departmen…
> They wanted the website to "feel" more like a real newspaper, including things like incorporating custom layout, design and other elements on the website. Explaining the limitations of HTML, CSS and Javascript was a bit ... frustrating for both sides.
Did they demand "page turning animation" each time user clicks "next page" in the pagination?