Entries for month: January 2011
The newspaper Web site as a proxy for your USP
24 January 2011 · By Earl J. Wilkinson
My hometown newspaper last week unveiled a re-thought Web site as part of a new digital cocktail of paid content, an app package, and more. It has its positives and negatives and is, like all new ventures, a work in progress.
Yet as a customer, I was as lost in the new Web site as I was in the old one. In fairness, I feel the same about all newspaper Web sites.
The greatest strength of newspapers is their breadth of coverage, which works so well in a print platform. Yet that is not a strength consumers generally value in today's era of over-choice — especially true for the Twitterfied online generation.
The transference of that breadth from the print platform to the online platform is the equivalent of an old man stepping into the loudest discotheque: sensory perception overload.
Upon seeing The Dallas Morning News' new design, I wondered how unique their treatment of breadth was. So I perused Web sites from The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian in the United Kingdom, Le Monde and Le Figaro in France, La Nacion and Clarín in Argentina, The Times of India and the Hindustan Times in India, El Mundo and ABC in Spain, De Standaard and De Morgen in Belgium, the Globe and Mail and National Post in Canada, and many more. Frankly, I found The Morning News' treatment of breadth on their home page better than most.
Since I don't do this often, I was surprised that I couldn't find a single major newspaper Web site worldwide that didn't light up their home page like the proverbial discotheque: 100+ entry points on its home page, dozens of sectional choices, many more sub-sectional choices, photo montages, banner ads, and more. Many of the Web sites took at least 10 scrolls of the mouse on a monstrous computer to get to the bottom (see, as an example, The Guardian's well-respected Web site).
Every major newspaper — including the best of the best — has transferred their print bundles to their primary Web sites. Each site was dizzying!
Where is the entry point to a content-rich home page where choices just aren't being made? Since Web sites aren't designed for long, deep browses, what are the 3-5 things this Web site can do for me that nobody else can offer? Since I have no time, how can those 3-5 things be shown without more than one scroll of my browser?
Home page a microcosm of troubled relationship with readers online. The newspaper's home page has become the symbol for what's wrong with how news organisations adapt to consumers in the increasingly digital world:
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