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Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
31–40 of 189 posts
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#32Why are newspapers so horrible? My family used to get a paper newspaper when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. It had all the regular stuff - news, local news, editorial, sports, etc. But mostly it was ads. On Sunday it was a monstrosity, being nearly unmanageable due to the number of ad inserts. Most of it you threw away without looking at. Most of the stories had no value. One day later I couldn't remember wha…
Disagree. Value depends on the newspaper and the reader in question. My wife loved the ad-heavy Sunday paper inserts. I grew up reading the NYT on the subway and that (mis)set my expectations for everything else I took later (Space Coast Today for ex., the testbed of the detestable "Factoid" news). Yesterday's two threads on the death of local reporting fill in a lot of what both of us left out.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#33I find it ironic the site has a big cookie modal you need to accept before reading anything.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMP is the only reasonable alternative I've seen How about making the site fast and usable in the first place?
Here is why: AMP is much cheaper and simpler to set up, it is way more optimized for mobile usage than trimming down your website, it brings better placement in search results and it is backed by the leading search engine itself, thus ensuring your team is not wasting resources trying to guess how Google works and how to exploit it.
w3c is an easier standard than amp
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
...and still have mostly ads.
The Washington Post is the perfect example of this. They have two paid plans, a "Basic" one and a "Premium EU Ad-Free Subscription" promising "No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking". However, trying to subscribe to the latter still says the following: > By subscribing, you agree to the use by us and our third-party partners of technologies such as cookies to personalize content and perform analytics. Plea…
"personalize content and perform analytics" does not necessarily have anything to do with ads. Examples abound: 3rd party A/B testing (Optimizely), 3rd party analytics (Google Analytics), 3rd party error reporting (Bugsnag), 3rd party page speed testing, etc.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is why: AMP is much cheaper and simpler to set up, it is way more optimized for mobile usage than trimming down your website, it brings better placement in search results and it is backed by the leading search engine itself, thus ensuring your team is not wasting resources trying to guess how Google works and how to exploit it.
w3c is an easier standard than amp
That cannot possibly be true, as AMP is literally a subset of HTML.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#37I 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…
Good points. I'd expand that by saying that these apply to any organization that wants a content-based site but has no need for a real web development team.
Non-technical users often don't know what they want until they see something on the screen, and once they see it on the screen, they inevitably want to make changes that undo the first set of things they asked for. Everybody seems to have an opinion about layouts and design features, whether they ought to or not, and the least-capable voices tend to be the loudest.
And you're absolutely right, explaining the limits of web dev to non-technical people is a perpetual exercise in frustration. They think web dev is like print design. As we know, it's not even close. Web design is constrained by a multitude of browser limitations that print simply does not have. They don't like to hear that.
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#38Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#39Oh the irony of reading this article on a website full of ads
Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
#40Why are newspapers so horrible? My family used to get a paper newspaper when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. It had all the regular stuff - news, local news, editorial, sports, etc. But mostly it was ads. On Sunday it was a monstrosity, being nearly unmanageable due to the number of ad inserts. Most of it you threw away without looking at. Most of the stories had no value. One day later I couldn't remember wha…
The news is horrible because journalists are almost never experts on whatever they're writing about, so whenever they write about something that might actually still have meaning in three weeks, they fuck it up.
They aren't experts at tech but are the best a local news, politics, crime, etc