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Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

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Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#131

Post by CharlesW »

firebones wrote: post #130
qwerty456127 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A "good" (which is subjective) news site isn't guaranteed or prevented by the use of any particular CMS.

A quick Google search shows that many popular news sites are WordPress-powered, including BBC America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Quartz, TechCrunch, Time, and Variety. Many of these are considered good.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#133

Post by ubernostrum »

always_good wrote: post #89
knowtheory wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and it's still sad to say that they capitalized on that fact so incredibly poorly that the following came to pass: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/1012781017940316161 > The Lawrence Journal-World, where Django was created, is now a Wordpress site. http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/jun/26/redesign-ljworld/

Or they realized that there isn't much value in building their own CMS.

I worked at the Journal-World for around five years, starting in 2006.

Upper management at the time was interesting. A lot of people who didn't necessarily understand the internet or technology in general, but knew they didn't, and were willing to hire and trust people who did. That was the magic sauce that led to Django, and a lot of the other innovative stuff. The owner of the paper, for example, had his secretary print out his emails and bring them into his office; then he'd write his replies on a manual typewriter, and hand them back to be typed into a computer. But he'd also managed to ride the wave of first the cable TV/internet boom (by setting up a cable division) and then the web boom (by hiring a team of people to build a first-class news site and giving them more or less free reign to do it right).

And that was how you got the heyday of the Journal-World. All sorts of interesting experiments in using the web to enhance journalism, close collaboration between the newsroom and the tech team, and a ton of cool things accomplished and a bunch of industry awards, etc. I actually had a byline at one point, on a feature that's now gone because Django got retired (a data-journalism project tracking the impact of flu during the H1N1 scare).

And other news organizations were happy to pay for the software to do their own version of that. We had both hosted and on-prem versions of it, and recommendations for hiring developers and training them to work on it, and as far as I could tell they seemed pretty happy to have something that had been designed at and by a newspaper (as opposed to other news CMS products, which often have their first encounter with a journalist at the time of production deployment).

But all good things come to an end. There were some management shakeups, and a lot of the tech team (myself included) left for greener pastures. A little while after that, I heard the CMS division was being shut down and everyone in it laid off; then I heard another company had made an offer to acquire it. As far as I know, Ellington (the Django-based news CMS) is still available today as a supported commercial product. But the Journal-World no longer uses it or, to my knowledge, maintains an in-house technology team like it used to.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#135

Post by panic »

zebraflask wrote: post #37
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…

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…

> 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.

That's just how design is. If you're making any software with a visual component, you need to be prepared to make significant revisions. Nailing down the visuals before writing much (or any) code can avoid a lot of this costly re-work, though sometimes there are still things you don't notice until you have working software.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#136

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

forapurpose wrote: post #82
phjesusthatguy3 wrote: post #5

Newspapers 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.

> Newspapers 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. Newspapers had little choice, because they compete with lots of other free information and because payment mechanisms are too costly (in reader time and frustration). > It was a bad idea then, and I don't think anyone's tried to fix it in the past 25 years. In fact, in journali…

1993 -- 25 years ago -- was an experimental time for the Internet.

The only competition they had was other pioneers slitting their own throats because that's how you got recognized on this new-fangled World Wide Web.

  A lot of newspapers thought they could sell ad space against their Internet properties for at least as much as they were selling their newspaper-based classified ads.  That was obviously not the case.
I appreciate that you think the WWW has always had the power it does now, but back in '93 it was a niche in the multiple ways a content provider had to distribute their wares.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#137

Post by qwerty456127 »

firebones wrote: post #130
qwerty456127 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I didn't say good. I said decent. As for me I would avoid WordPress at all costs but the fact is it can be used to get the thing done tolerably well and there are just so many people who can operate it.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#138

Post by sonnyblarney »

lllr_finger wrote: post #117
sonnyblarney wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that they did see it clearly in the short term, and more ads and tracking always provided considerably more revenue. If Outbrain offers you $1M to be put on your site but it slows page load by 500ms on average, you put Outbrain on your site because there's no easy way to quantify how bad 500ms is to a userbase of 100M. It sucks, and is part of the reason I changed industries.

"e there's no easy way to quantify how bad 500ms is to a userbase of 100M"

No easy way, but it's not that-that hard, and ultimately they have to grasp there is some kind of tradeoff or it would all be ads.

I wonder if there's a business model there.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#139

Post by patio11 »

tptacek wrote: post #129
TeMPOraL wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ---…

they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas

As someone with repeated direct experience with the elite corps that staffs their bureaus in Japan, I cannot provide evidence in favor of your hypothesis that they keep a special breed of Pulitzerschreck around for that purpose. They still call me for Japanese domestic political analysis on the basis of a) in Japan b) speaks English c) was in the NYT in 2011.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#140

Post by MisterTea »

Modern webdesign, along with most of modern "computing", threw common sense out the window along with most of history in a quest to create the most bland, shapeless, flat websites and apps full of white space as far as the mouse can scroll. I can see flattening out things. but for the love of god use the damn pixels for drawing things like text and graphics instead of white nothingness.
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