Why news websites suck

Update: Great discussion about this post on my Facebook page.

This was the home screen of the News & Record — my hometown newspaper — Sunday morning.

NR

For good measure, it includes a rollover ad that takes over the entire screen.

So, quick: What’s the big story of the day? I said, quick!

This is the second page of the home screen.

22

It’s a mess. Who was served by this? A real estate company and the ad salesperson, of course. Anyone else?

The News & Record isn’t alone. Here is the Wilmington Star News Sunday home  page.

starnews

I’ll grant you this makes money for the newspapers. Not a whole lot, but it is revenue. I used to work at the News & Record, and I still have friends there. I pray for the newspaper’s future for their sakes and for Greensboro’s. But this ain’t it. Selling your site to one advertiser, overwhelming and obscuring your news content, doesn’t serve your readership, your community or your credibility.

Rich media, flashing banners, pop-ups and rollovers all grab your attention the same way a carnival barker does, trying to get you into a peep show. But that’s not why most people go to a news site. People want pages that load quickly, are easy to navigate and help you find what you’re looking for. How do these do?

There are reasons that people have moved to social media to get their news, to using apps rather than web pages, to avoiding home pages altogether.

On Sunday, I posted a screen shot of the News & Record’s page on Twitter. Some of the responses:

I understand that building websites like these tend to be corporate decisions. In the case of the News & Record, BH Media Group owns the paper. Here is what its chairman and CEO, Warren Buffett, thinks, according to a column last month in USA Today.

“Warren Buffett is hardly a naif, and he bought up his newspapers with his eyes open. The ‘code’ that he likes to allude to involves figuring out how to make much more digital revenue, ‘blending the digital and print model,’ as Buffett puts it. What concerns Buffett is that ‘it’s three years later and we’re still figuring out a solution.’

“He adds, ‘I’ve got to see the answer. Wishful thinking won’t do a thing.'”

I agree with him about wishful thinking. Wishful thinking has contributed mightily to the downward slide newspapers are riding. Now, websites like the News & Record’s and the Star News’ are purposely ignoring what its users want. Newspapers have been down that road before, and they are still reaping the dire results.

In fairness, by Monday, the home page was cleaned up a bit…which simply means that Tate didn’t buy the entire page.

Here is this morning’s screen shot.

today

For reference, here are the Sunday home pages of a few of the news sites that won 2015 Webby Awards.

guardianThe Week Times

 

10 thoughts on “Why news websites suck

  1. The N&R’s site has never been anywhere as good as it needed to be, and since BH Media’s last “redesign,” the home page has been unusable and the rest of the site essentially so. Outsiders may or may not care to know that BH Media has imposed a one-size-fits-all “design” on pretty much all its newspaper properties — and that in many of its newspaper towns, the newspaper home pages are now essentially hostage to ads from real-estate agencies also recently purchased by Berkshire-Hathaway.

  2. Excellent observation, Lex. The problem is always in the details. And being owned by a real estate company that also owns a prefab housing manufacturer practicing predatory lending is problem for a media organization.

  3. I use ad blockers and rarely visit news sites on my phone (am a mostly-desktop user). I have a NYTimes subscription and think it’s one of the best (technically and visually) news sites online. I can find top news, opinion (heck, that’s why I buy the NYT) and more with reasonable ads. The N&R site is useless; I can’t even find a story I’ve heard about and FB links take forEVER to load. I have friends at the N&R who are pumping out great stuff but it’s unfindable. As for ad blockers, until news orgs take responsibility for well-done sites with non-screaming ads, then they get blocked (and I have an N&R subscription but it doesn’t block the ads; what gives on that?).

    The name for those windows that open in front of sites is “modal.” When I get a modal on almost ANY site, I close the window. Because it’s a stupid thing to do.

  4. And what’s under all those annoying ad popular and takeovers isn’t much better. Too many news sites, as the great designer Roger Black once said, look like NASCAR cars, overly festooned with garish graphics and links. Nobody wants to navigate a list of 10 or 20 (or 30, in one instance I’m aware of) tiny-type headlines, or try to discern what’s in an image that’s smaller than a postage stamp (much less pick among a group of those tiny images). The average news site presents a reader with literally hundreds of choices on a single (endlessly scrolling) screen, and that’s completely overwhelming.

    Most news sites know nothing of the science of user interface or user experience, and that’s as much a giant turnoff to prospective readers as the overbearing ads.

    • I have long had, in my head, the idea for a movie in which advertising has completely taken over. Ads on toilet paper rolls, inside coffins at wakes, passersby being bludgeoned to death by those air-blown floppy figures as they walk by on the sidewalk.

      One of the scenes involves a TV screen from a local newscast and the screen is so filled with scrolling, flashing and crawling messages that the announcer literally is caught trying to tear a hole in them big enough to make himself visible. I think my movie is becoming reality.

  5. It’s hard to imagine there are no ad agencies that understand the “swarm and confuse” tactic turns off customers. I clicked on some links below a WA Post article this morning and got to a site where you literally could not click anything that would move you through the photo gallery. Every option opened an ad. I wanted to see the Ferrari photos, but the site designer literally hid the reader-serving bits.
    It’s an ugly business.

  6. C’mon, man…newspapers have ALWAYS been about advertising, not news. As far back as my childhood (1960s) “news” papers were 50-60% advertising.

    Why on earth would you expect the 21st Century version to be any different?

  7. You’ve missed the forest for the trees. Many of us have deserted the traditional news media because of its bias and junk articles -look at the article in one of your screenshots. “Overwhelmingly white.” Go sell that to someone else. As the overwhelmingly whites who overwhelmingly held paid subscriptions are deserting, the papers rely on ads so the overwhelmingly everyone else can read their sites free. Let them all die. Couldn’t care less.

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