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Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

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Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#171

Post by Kalium »

ryandrake wrote: post #99
vntok wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not obliged in any way to use the service. It is purely optional. If you choose to use it, you consent to some things.

Sorry, but you don’t seem to grasp the concept of “opt-in”. The service is optional. The tracking is not opt-in, given you choose to use the service.

If thing A is optional, and thing B is permanently attached to thing B, there are a couple of ways to express this relationship. One could say "Thing B is non-optionally attached to optional thing A". One could also say "Thing B is optional, but bundled with thing A".

Some might say "Thing B is optional", because thing B is attached to thing A that is optional, and their inseparability does not change this characteristic.

I understand where you're coming from. It would be really awesome have privacy-respecting to have an "opt out of all tracking forever and just let me have the service" button, without which there's really no option at all. That's a strong, principled, justified, and completely valid position.

Yet, it's perhaps possible that different vernacular readings of the word might arrive at different, though equally valid, positions.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#173

Post by TeMPOraL »

forapurpose wrote: post #166
TeMPOraL wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be, but then again, it's a rare thing. And the "idle commentary from bloggers and commenters" has the benefits that for any topic, you can find bloggers/commenters who are both subject matter experts, and have no incentive to misrepresent the story.

> bloggers/commenters who ... have no incentive to misrepresent the story Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation. Just look at HN comments; they are among the highest quality available, but still it abounds. > bloggers/commenters who are ... subject matter experts And orders of…

> Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation.

I suppose the idea I'm trying to communicate can be also expressed as navigating towards localized pockets of lower misrepresentations levels in the cesspool of Internet. I'm arguing that regular news outlets have high concentration of misrepresentation, and quite frequently are the source of it.

Or: I'm not saying that if you pop on to a random subreddit you'll immediately find gold-standard, unbiased people. But I am saying that for any given domain, if you find a niche community and browse it for a bit, you'll get, on average, much better information than you'll get from reading news articles on the same topics.

Another extra feature of niche communities like various specialized subreddits, or HN, is that the experts, the pretend-experts and the wannabe-experts will engage in a discussion. This does not only help filter out obvious bullshit, but also provides extra information and can tell you when a problem is so complex it can't be accurately summarized in a headline or a short article.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#174

Post by manigandham »

jccalhoun wrote: post #48

I used to like the local newspaper's terrible site. On the rare times I went to it looking for news, they would put up a div to blur out the article if you weren't a subscriber. It was easy to just open the inspector and delete the div to read the article. Now they update their site to actually not load the article unless you subscribe. Progress...

That actually is real progress... I'm not sure why its a problem if the content is meant for subscribers.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#175

Post by jinglebells »

BurningFrog wrote: post #144
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…

This sounds utterly ripe for someone to develop a standard newspaper web site that all the thousands of newspapers around the world can adopt with some minimal branding and customization. I assume/hope someone did this in the 15 years since?

Like The Guardian? https://github.com/guardian/frontend

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#176

Post by KuhlMensch »

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…

15 years ago is a long time ago.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#177

Post by pvg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #170
tptacek wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ---…

> But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. I don't see how that's a silly thing to argue. Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different. You don't just call "Gell-Mann Amnesia" upon spotting a simple jargon mistake and call all news bullshit. But people have different expertise. You, me and others here know our CS; many of us also know our maths & physics, and derived specializations ranging f…

Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different.

Hah, you can't try to sneak out of this using the tangential Gell-Mann lifeline. You said something along the lines of 'Hard to call it idle cynicism and incuriosity because [overt expression of idle cynicism and incuriosity]'. That's plainly silly.

As to this 'effect' itself, I've always found it strange it's given the weight and consideration that it sometimes is. I'm no Crichtonoscopist and I've never seen the full text of his remarks but given it was a bit in a speech delivered at the "International Leadership Forum" and arrives at the conclusion media is useless, I'm guessing it wasn't meant entirely seriously. It's a little amusing anecdote and morsel for thought in a talk - not some expression of deep insight and hard-hitting media criticism. If someone had come up with it on HN, there'd be legions of black-belt logicians leaping in to check off the fallacies (appeal to authority? confirmation bias? the dreaded 'anecdata'? plain old vanity? it's got it all).

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#178

Post by kminehart »

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…

I work for a news company right now. Or rather, the parent company of a local news, similar to Gannett (the company that was mentioned in the article).

I've found that we have a lot of freedom, and we've recently deployed a redesigned website that we're happy with. There's definitely been a lot of frustration from arguing with all the different departments: advertising, circulation, editorial / the newsroom, but the most frustrating aspect by far has been the technical debt we still have yet to address properly.

Software that was purchased by our company several years ago for managing subscribers and their subscriptions is abysmal. It's used far beyond its scope, where generic "notes" fields are used to store critical information. For example, these systems are for print subscriptions only, so they amortize billing, and there's no email address field. We've shoehorned online subscription functionality by including email addresses in the notes field. There's no API or any sort of way to truly interact with these "systems" either, so customers are just flat-out unable to manage their own account without some middle-man manually entering form-submitted data.

Truthfully I feel that even with our redesigned website (which has gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews), we still suffer from an awful online presence. What sort of subscription service exists these days that doesn't even let you change your address without calling? It's pretty sad.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#179

Post by chooseaname »

vntok wrote: post #14
TekMol wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

> Here is why: AMP is much cheaper and simpler to set up, ...

This needs a reference.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#180

Post by dang »

jakeinsf wrote: post #158
dang wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attacking fellow users like this will get you banned on HN, even if you find their website annoying. Please don't post like this. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As an innocent bystander, and at the risk of getting banned, I have to say I think the post you're replying to was thoughtful and had a substantive point which is that posts that use the comment section to promote their business ventures, especially those that are most likely pyramid schemes, are unwelcome. You'd rather ban the whistleblower? I guess you don't like the word "scam" because it assumes a value judgement…

I'm glad you've noticed that HN is relatively spam-free. If you continue to read HN, you'll also notice that we don't ban people for replying to us. We ban them for breaking the site guidelines, and even then we're pretty lenient.

It's not spam when a longtime user is linking to their work in a relevant context and hasn't been making a habit of it. The two cases are trivial to tell apart if you're willing to take a minute, and it has always been ok to for users to tell others about their work this way on HN—as long as they don't overdo it. Whether you like the project or not is a separate question. As for thoughtfulness, "spam your scam elsewhere" is basically leading with a punch in the nose.

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