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Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

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Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#121

Post by lllr_finger »

TekMol wrote: post #11
lllr_finger wrote: post #7

I 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, Outbr…

AMP is the only reasonable alternative I've seen How about making the site fast and usable in the first place?

That's what happened originally. Then bigger and bigger ad deals came in, then you needed more tracking to sell better deals.

The current revenue model is completely at odds with performance. If you're an established media company you can't just bail on principle and give up millions in revenue, unfortunately.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#122

Post by WalterSear »

ryandrake wrote: post #42
samspenc wrote: post #4

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. 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. I agree with the rest of your points but this one doesn't really make sense. My guess is it would take fewer engineers to make these websites better. The horrible parts of newspaper websites are the pop-ups and broken…

Not fewer - better.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#123

Post by snowwrestler »

joegahona wrote: post #78
snowwrestler wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it brings better placement in search results This is the only reason anyone bothers with AMP. And the reason Google does that--and the only reason Google pushes AMP at all--is so that they can become an intermediary between the publisher and their customers. If you're concerned about walled gardens, and you think AMP is the solution, I'd suggest you're not thinking clearly about what AMP actually is.

> it brings better placement in search results Recent data suggests otherwise: http://blog.chartbeat.com/2018/08/23/research-study-1-3-publ... What AMP does is allow product ppl to use Google's authority to cut out all the script crap that Sales lobbies for, even if they have to lie a bit. I.e., "If we don't do AMP, we'll make Google mad and sink in organic rankings" is a much stronger argument than "We ought to remo…

You can't get into the top stories carousel on mobile SERPs unless you provide an AMP page and let Google cache it.

Of course, not everyone who provides an AMP page and lets Google cache it gets into that carousel, so not everyone gets the benefits. But the point is, you can't even give yourself the opportunity for that traffic bump unless you play the game exactly as Google demands.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#124

Post by Twisol »

vntok wrote: post #36
anoncoward111 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

w3c is an easier standard than amp

That cannot possibly be true, as AMP is literally a subset of HTML.

I have no particular stake in the specifics of AMP here, but X being a subset of Y does _not_ mean that X is necessarily no more complex than Y. Adding restrictions on something necessarily gives a subset of the original thing, but abiding by those restrictions may be complex.

The example that comes to mind is that every formal language on {a, b} is a subset of the regular language given by /[ab]⁎/. It's incredibly easy to recognize the latter language, but there are literally undecidable languages that are a subset of it.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#125

Post by vntok »

Twisol wrote: post #124
vntok wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That cannot possibly be true, as AMP is literally a subset of HTML.

I have no particular stake in the specifics of AMP here, but X being a subset of Y does _not_ mean that X is necessarily no more complex than Y. Adding restrictions on something necessarily gives a subset of the original thing, but abiding by those restrictions may be complex. The example that comes to mind is that every formal language on {a, b} is a subset of the regular language given by /[ab]⁎/. It's incredibly e…

In that case it is no more complex. AMP is more structured than HTML, has fewer valid tags and attributes, and has an official implementation documentation that expresses how to design the perfect AMP UI in a much more concise and simple way than the HTML docs.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#126

Post by ACow_Adonis »

forapurpose wrote: post #85
samspenc wrote: post #4

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…

Many of these issues point to the same root cause: A vacuum of leadership at the executive level. Those people often don't understand the Internet, UX, etc., and thus can't and don't make good decisions, creating chaos beneath them. For example, until recently at the New York Times, the head of social media did not use social media himself.[0] Think about that - think about how important social media is to the NYT. I…

To be fair, it's generally accepted knowledge that drug dealers and producers probably shouldn't be consuming their own product.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#127

Post by qwerty456127 »

samspenc wrote: post #4

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…

> Lack of a real technical / engineering department

A decent news website is quite easy to set up with Jekyll or WordPress and there are so many people that can do this around all over the world, there is no real need for an engineering department.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#128

Post by bentrevor »

epiapp wrote: post #95
rossdavidh wrote: post #91

So, besides the many negative things I could say about how bad newspaper sites yes in fact are, I have a question: is there anywhere out there a newspaper site (even local) that IS just static HTML, with unobtrusive or nonexistent ads? Like, we only need one maybe, and we could support it. Does it exist?

I don't know if it counts, but there's lite.cnn.io Besides that, I just disable javascript for The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, etc.

There is also https://text.npr.org/ , which was discussed here about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342758

I thought there was a comment in there listing some other news sites that did this (besides CNN), but I skimmed and I can't find it now so I'm probably misremembering.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#129

Post by tptacek »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #118
pvg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. No newspaper can really overcome a combination of idle cynicism and incuriosity. Perhaps you just don't like news.

Hard to call it "idle cynicism and incuriosity" if you know that most of what's in the news is at best a surface-level coverage, most likely bullshit, and also completely inconsequential for anything. News is great as a social object - you and me both read some reporting about an event at the same time, so when we meet at a bar, we have something to talk about. It's really bad if you're trying to learn accurate infor…

As a general statement this seems plainly false. Just go to the Pulitzer site, to the last year's winners, skip to the "investigative journalism" category, and click around the finalists and back year over year.

Nerds discussing journalism on HN are obsessed with something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (it's really the Michael Crichton effect but whatever). It suggests that if you have an area of expertise --- computer science in our case, resurrecting dinosaurs in his --- you can fact-check the news media, and, upon spotting errors pertaining to your expertise, draw conclusions about the quality of the whole publication.

But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. However good journalists might or might not be at reporting on tech startups (and John Carreyrou seems to have done a pretty amazing job with that for WSJ), they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas, cultivating sources in state and local governments, breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and reporting on toxic fire retardants in crib mattresses.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#130

Post by firebones »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #127
samspenc wrote: post #4

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…

> Lack of a real technical / engineering department A decent news website is quite easy to set up with Jekyll or WordPress and there are so many people that can do this around all over the world, there is no real need for an engineering department.

What's an example of a good news website that uses Jekyll or WordPress?
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