News website FAIL

When is an award-winning website still a really bad website? When it’s reviewed by John Temple, who gives the Arizona Daily Star site a resounding “FAIL” based on 18 criteria.

The Arizona Daily Star (azstarnet.com) had been recognized by the EPpy awards as the “best news Web site with fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors.”  But while that may make for good promotional copy, it doesn’t mean that readers — you know, the ones who are supposedly using and interacting with the site — are being offered a useful product.

Temple administers a test created by Mark Potts to determine how well azstarnet.com is serving the typical user. Again and again, from listings of the best restaurants to comprehensive coverage of local personalities, the site fails to measure up.

Its failure on the first three criteria, including “Without using search, find continuing, in-context coverage of a  long-running local story” — underscores the usefulness of what Martin Langeveld (and I, as well) has been arguing for — wikifying the newsroom:

Wouldn’t it make sense to build all of the back story into a wiki on the topic, and to make it the responsibility of the reporter to update the wiki whenever something new happens? And once the wiki is created, why not make it available online, linked in the printed and online versions of the story, so a reader can get a summary of all the background the paper possesses, not just whatever the reporter considers relevant to the current story.

At the end of a separate post about attracting an online news audience, Langeveld emphasizes that communication, not design for its own sake, should be foremost on the mind of those who run news websites:

It’s not about how sexy-looking your site is. It’s not about having the absolute latest display technology. It’s about how you engage readers with conversations and with ways of interacting with news staffers and with each other.

Does this headline need a rewrite?

Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but the back-page headline from today’s tbt* sure seems to be teetering on the edge of offensiveness.

Yes, the deck offers some context to the use of the word “primal,” but considering that it’s clearly being used in the sense of “primitive” and not “original,” and in light of the accompanying photo, I’d say “Primal Time” betrays of lack of good taste and judgment.

Build your community, not numbers

While it’s easy to spot the news outlets that, desperate to survive in the new media ecosystem, stray outside their local focus and engage in an obvious grab for page views, others have realized they must expand their concept of business operations and provide the communities they serve something of value.

And blogging about whatever’s hot in Google Trends isn’t it — that’s just  playing a short-sighted and pointless numbers game. Sure, a site may see a spike in traffic because a blogger made sure to put up a post about whatever was most popular in Google search that day. But to what end? How long until advertisers see the stats for themselves and discover that they aren’t getting the click-throughs those misleading numbers promised, that all those eyeballs were a just an ephemeral occurrence?

WestSeattleBlog.com tries to build a relationship with local businesses by providing free seminars. Men’s Health offers an iPhone app that users can purchase in order to buy its Workouts. While the The Seattle Courant didn’t have the capital to make good on its ambitious vision, its business strategy is worth filing away for future reference:

City Paper writer’s must-read critique of Huffington Post

Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper has written an excellent, insightful article on Huffington Post, critiquing the popular news site’s opportunistic blurring of the line between progressivism and fetishism:

Only a religious conservative would bother to make a stink out of a body part which most men, women, and children have in sets of two. It’s almost enough to make fetishizing nipples on your Web site sound like a liberal position. If it pisses off the religious conservatives, that means it’s a good thing, right? After all, this is just “entertainment,” anyway—who cares if it’s progressive or not when we’re all just staring at nipples and having a good time? As Harry Shearer points out on HuffPo, everybody’s doing it!

The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there’s no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman’s body part is a priority. Real women’s issues, not so much.

Not only is Hess’s piece thought-provoking and very well-written, but it’s a much needed tonic for anyone who’s ever been turned off by Huffington Post’s “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to news.

Why Matt Lauer’s interview of Sarah Jane Moore came up short

Rachel Sklar criticizes Matt Lauer’s interview of President Gerald Ford’s would-be assassin, Sarah Jane Moore. Sklar reaches for the profound in the mundane pairing of photos of Moore and American Idol contestant Adam Lambert, but her critique of Lauer makes the larger, unspoken point that the journalist’s job is to explain:

Where Lauer really fell short, though, was in explaining how she’d become rehabilitated. How did she get from crazy gun-toting revolutionary, prison escapee, extreme enough to keep in solitary confinement, to gentle-looking old lady whom he welcomed with, “It’s good to see you.”  He treated her like she wasn’t a criminal, yet failed to set that up in the intro piece and never actually explored how she got there.

Portland to the New York Times: Thanks but no thanks

Because love is a two-way street, Oregonian columnist Anna Griffin gently but firmly tells The New York Times that its courtship of Portland will only end in heartbreak:

Here’s the problem: You’re making us something we’re not. Most of us don’t have time for a weekend at the Ace Hotel, or the wardrobe for First Thursday. Sure, we talk about racial tensions, but we haven’t conquered them. We still aren’t sure what to do with either our mayor or our major-league ambitions. …

…Besides, frankly, we’re just not that into you. Sure, we love curling up with you on Sunday mornings, sipping our Stumptown and taking a glimpse into a world where people talk about “frenemies,” “man dates,” and where their parents’ parents went to college. But, at heart, we’re simpler folks. You’ll eventually grow bored of our easy commutes and healthy living. One of these days, we’re going to wake up to discover you’ve dumped us for Detroit or Houston.

Gawker Media's Nick Denton knows where the money isn't

An awfully provocative comment about the news industry from Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, taken from this Q&A with Advertising Age:

People — particularly if they’re under 40 — have news priorities other than those of the editors of The New York Times or producers of the “NBC Nightly News.” A new tablet from Apple — or last night’s episode of “Gossip Girl” or the adventures of the hipster grifter — is a bigger deal than the latest petty scandal in Albany. You think that’s a damning indictment of modern society and a recipe for idiocracy? Fine. Start a nonprofit to cover all the local-government news you think a healthy society needs. But don’t expect advertisers — or commercially-minded publishers or readers, for that matter — to share your interests.

Fuel economy ledes about Obama announcement

Here’s a survey of today’s ledes from some of the nation’s top newspapers about President Obama’s intentions to toughen fuel economy standards for automakers. The Wall Street Journal offers the most specific opening graf, while the Washington Post and New York Times do a good job of contextualizing the announcement. The Los Angeles Times lede, on the other hand, is syntactically jarring, sacrificing clarity and accessibility for conjecture and information that could have been included further down in the article:

Wall Street Journal:

The Obama administration plans to order auto makers to increase the fuel economy of automobiles sold in the U.S. to 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, four years faster than current federal law requires, people familiar with the matter said.

Washington Post:

The Obama administration today plans to propose tough standards for tailpipe emissions from new automobiles, establishing the first nationwide regulation for greenhouse gases.

New York Times:

President Obama will announce tough new nationwide rules for automobile emissions and mileage standards on Tuesday, embracing standards that California has sought to enact for years over the objections of the auto industry and the Bush administration.

USA Today:

The Obama administration is set to announce Tuesday what will amount to a sweeping revision to auto-emission and fuel-economy standards, putting them in the same package for the first time.

Los Angeles Times:

The agreement that the Obama administration will announce today forcing dramatic reductions in vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and improvements in auto mileage marks a potentially pivotal shift in the battle over global warming — and a vindication of California’s long battle to toughen standards.

Here's where newspapers need to invest their resources

Of the seven strategies Mark Potts lays out for the news industry to adopt, two in particular stood out for me as of particular importance. His criticism of news sites that spread themselves thin by trying to appeal to all readers is one that bears repeating. See if you agree.

I’m excerpting them here, but I recommend you read the entire post.

Vertical products: One of the most broken things about the newspaper business is the “all things to all people” model. By trying to do a little of everything, newspapers don’t really do anything well—for readers or for advertisers. New products that focus on specific, vertical audiences should be the wave of the future, but so far they’re barely even a trickle (let’s see—there’s Gannett’s MomsLikeMe franchise, and then…not much else).

New forms of advertising: Banner ads are so…1997. Interstitials, pop-ups and intrusive ads are so…obnoxious. Classifieds are so…dead. Meanwhile, Google is making money off of local search, other non-newspaper companies are pioneering things like click-per-call and pay-per-click, and various startups are perfecting cheap ways to create and sell local ads. Could it be that newspapers are having trouble making online advertising revenue grow because they’re selling the wrong kinds of online ads? Hmmm.

Putting the value back in journalism

As if newspaper layoffs weren’t bad enough,  someone had to go and present an essay titled “Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay.” Sheesh.

The provocative title isn’t one I would expect my journalistic brethren to embrace. Formal instruction has taught us that ours is a noble profession, one that provides an invaluable service by enabling an informed democracy. But as Robert G. Picard points out, that valuation no longer commands the tangible economic benefits it once did:

In the past, these journalistic benefits produced significant economic value, but today their value is diminishing rapidly. A significant reason for the reduction is value is that news and information producers and providers have less control over the communication space than ever before. In the past, limitations on distribution mechanisms and the cost structures of operating media promoted monopolies and oligopolies in communication supply. This increased the economic value of content by excluding provision by other suppliers.