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Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

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Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#141

Post by nitwit005 »

jccalhoun wrote: post #47
redleggedfrog wrote: post #20

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…

I agree. The thing that most conversations on how to get people to pay for news miss out on the most important element: the news has to be worth paying for. When I was in grad school a few years ago the college had a program to encourage newspaper readership 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 ther…

Have to, unfortunately, agree with the low value of the Sunday papers, even decades ago. Toss out the piles of ads, sports, comics, gardening, and you were left with a sliver of generic stories they could have printed any time.

One thing I suspect has been a blow to the news is that they used to be able to pretend people would look at all those ads. How many people were genuinely looking at all that? Now it's extremely easy to learn that its just not happening.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#142

Post by tptacek »

patio11 wrote: post #139
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 ---…

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.

I believe that you got contacted by a dumb reporter about a Japanese political story by an NYT reporter, but I also know that there are people like Tom Wright getting paid by major news outlets to cover Asia; the evidence I have suggests that those outlets do a great deal of important investigative journalism.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#143

Post by procinct »

toddsiegel wrote: post #132

I subscribe to a few online publications. I know paywalls can be easy to cheat, but I prefer not to. I would love it if news sites would add pay per article, where I could buy 50 articles upfront and use them up over a few months.

That's a similar model to Blendle IIRC. It's been some time since I used Blendle but I remember it being a cool idea, just the app was a little half baked back then. Not sure what sort of state it would be in now.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#144

Post by BurningFrog »

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?

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#145

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

> Too many feature requests, often contradicting each other. It wasn't clear who was in charge of making decisions on website changes.

This is the default state of every software project that doesn't have an unusually mature customer.

It is your job to try to be an unusually mature supplier and make these tradeoffs explicit to them.

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#146

Post by jumelles »

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?

I don't think they ever will, but it would be incredible if the New York Times open-sourced their tools.

https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digita...

https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scoop-a-glimpse-in...

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#148

Post by sciurus »

sparkzilla wrote: post #98
llao wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The decentralised platform for trusted news applications > The NewsBlocks token sale is planned for Q4 2018. The token sale will fund the creation of the NewsBlocks blockchain, seed the content, and fund application development. Spam your scam elsewhere.

1) It's directly related to the OP 2) Why is it a scam?

1) It's an ICO 2) See 1

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#149

Post by amarand »

Web-sites are better if you use an ad blocking service. Sure, some sites like the Wall Street Journal won't let you read content with an ad-blocker enabled unless you're a paying subscriber, but I can almost always get similar content elsewhere.

But yes, that's one of the problems with taking one form of medium (a physical newspaper) and abstracting it into a new format.

When the original Windows came out, they had to figure out which low-res icons would most accurately represent their real-world counterparts. But that was decades ago.

Now, things (icons, UI, design) are more symbolic of what we want to do, not the way they were.

I feel like newspapers, sometimes, try to keep their newspaper look and feel, all the while, adding a crap-ton of useless content. I'm there for an article, not for all the rest of it.

I have a few friends who work in the news(paper) industry, and I know that the job of photographer, in some newsrooms, has also taken on the role of web-developer, and even reporter. I mean, you're on the scene taking pictures, why not ask questions too? A difficult job made more difficult by lowering circulation levels, and lower budgets.

So I guess the best way to encourage good on-line news is to subscribe to the digital formats, and let them know when they aren't doing their job?

Re: Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

#150

Post by saagarjha »

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…

> Apple and Facebook want walled gardens where they control the content and give the providers whatever revenue they consider "fair", with the huge benefit that the stories would be fast to load and provide a friendly, uniform interface.

Funny, this really looks to me like you just described Google and AMP.

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