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Slightly off-topic bc the NYT is clearly not the target here, but I'll say it anyway: the webdev crew at NYT is first-rate. They've even open-sourced some cool stuff. It's a shame other papers generally can't hold a candle to the standard they set.
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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…
> explaining the limits of web dev to non-technical people is a perpetual exercise in frustration That is doing the wrong thing. These non-technical people don't need to understand "limits". They need someone with a clear process who guides them through it. Unfortunately many web devs have no process. Print design has its own limitations but the process which people have to follow is more established.
I 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…
1) Business. Nobody pays for news so they need to generate income from ads.
2) Bad tech (talent, infrastructure, resources, etc) on both publisher and ad vendors which creates horrible bloated pages.
That's it. Anything else is so secondary as to be insignificant. Take a look at private subscriber only sites and you'll notice how fast and pleasant they are to use, because they don't have the poorly implemented heavy cruft added to the page.
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that would be awesome. but how do you expect it to happen? AMP is actually making news easier to read in a real practical way right now. sitting back and suggesting we throw it away in exchange for idealistic nonsense that has been proven not to work by the last 20 years is not making anything better. I'd love for AMP to be replaced by something better. but "just make nice websites" is not better. it's the status quo…
I've never encountered an AMP site so far as I know, but the real practical way I make news easier to read is to put everything in reader mode. Simple, straightforward, lightweight, ad-free, does not depend on cooperation from the server.
So are you suggesting all news agencies switch to subscription models with paywalls?
I work in adtech and know all the top publishers. There are 2 reasons: 1) Business. Nobody pays for news so they need to generate income from ads. 2) Bad tech (talent, infrastructure, resources, etc) on both publisher and ad vendors which creates horrible bloated pages. That's it. Anything else is so secondary as to be insignificant. Take a look at private subscriber only sites and you'll notice how fast and pleasant…
I worked at one of the large TV/news companies in Canada, and the analytics and ad code was literally 80% of the code of our sites.
Turning them off took a 10 second load time down to 1 second. Not even kidding. These websites are mostly adtech code from 30 different sources.
Why 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…
This model wasn't that bad. Given this was print, the ads were somehow vetted - chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola) wouldn't exist, because even the shittiest of newspapers would say "What is this bullshit?" and put a stop to that. Even the people at the printing plant would be perplexed if they had to print that shit. Going further, even the business model of chumboxes wouldn't exist - back in the days of print, ads were m…
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You don't need AMP, you just need PM's with the ability to grasp the tradeoff between more ads and less users as a result of that. Obviously it's not an easy thing to decide, but they should be trying to measure that because I can't handle this crap either. TV is dying because it's jammed full of annoying commercials. And it's getting worse as they are dying.
No, TV is dying not because of commercials, but because other formats of access to the content are easily accessible. There's simply no point in checking if there's anything interesting on TV now, when you can just pick a movie from a streaming service or read news on the website. After all, free online services also show a lot of ads, but this doesn't prevent us, say, from watching a music video on YouTube (one of t…
Also, free on-line services "show" a lot of ads, but everyone I know deals with it using ad blockers.
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I've never encountered an AMP site so far as I know, but the real practical way I make news easier to read is to put everything in reader mode. Simple, straightforward, lightweight, ad-free, does not depend on cooperation from the server.
> ad free So are you suggesting all news agencies switch to subscription models with paywalls?
Or find another way of making money (that doesn't involve the electronic equivalent of spitting at peoples' faces), and treat the free part as marketing expense.
I work in adtech and know all the top publishers. There are 2 reasons: 1) Business. Nobody pays for news so they need to generate income from ads. 2) Bad tech (talent, infrastructure, resources, etc) on both publisher and ad vendors which creates horrible bloated pages. That's it. Anything else is so secondary as to be insignificant. Take a look at private subscriber only sites and you'll notice how fast and pleasant…
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These aren’t so much questions of the online business of news so much as they are matters that speak to online news design—the look and feel of a newspaper’s website to the reader, or what a designer calls user interface and user experience. But the business and design of news are inextricably linked. As print ad revenue cratered, the need to squeeze revenue from digital sources grew. And that pushed news websites to their breaking point.
“Ads are just brutal for what they do to your browser and the sort of utter lack of regard they have for user experience,” says Ian Adelman, founding design director of Slate and current chief creative officer at New York Magazine.