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 department.
2. They wanted the website to "feel" more like a real newspaper, including things like incorporating custom layout, design and other elements on the website. Explaining the limitations of HTML, CSS and Javascript was a bit ... frustrating for both sides.
3. Too many opinions on what the website should look like. Ditto for even small features such as what the photo gallery and subscription pages should look like.
4. Too many feature requests, often contradicting each other. It wasn't clear who was in charge of making decisions on website changes.
> 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 department.
I agree with the rest of your points but this one doesn't really make sense. My guess is it would take fewer engineers to make these websites better. The horrible parts of newspaper websites are the pop-ups and broken scrolling and ads that follow you and fixed-position "dickbars" at the top and bottom--things that don't come with simple HTML and need to be deliberately added by developers.
Newspapers really do just need a functioning website. Instead they pay developers to add in all these horrible things.
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.
It makes total sense to me. Having web developers is not the same thing as "a real technical / engineering department." Most of the cruft on newspapers sites is not carefully implemented custom code. It's a library, or vendor-supplied code, or CMS plugin that is just installed, configured, and forgotten about. Without strong engineering leadership, shit just gets piled on top of shit as the feature requests come in.
Which also relates to items 3 and 4... without strong technical leadership, a developer team can easily just settle into triage/service mode, where they just try to keep up with satisfying each request that comes in. The result is growing technical debt and an unfocused, confused product.
I think, like the article hits on, this comes down to the fact that users have a rather different definition of "functioning website" than advertising driven news sites do.
I have never seen a non-tech business (law firm, dental practice, newspaper org, etc...) that could not use one or two engineers and give their business major advantage against their competitors. Unfortunately, you cannot convince them of this.
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 and design features, whether they ought to or not, and the least-capable voices tend to be the loudest.
And you're absolutely right, explaining the limits of web dev to non-technical people is a perpetual exercise in frustration. They think web dev is like print design. As we know, it's not even close. Web design is constrained by a multitude of browser limitations that print simply does not have. They don't like to hear that.
> 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 and design features, whether they ought to or not, and the least-capable voices tend to be the loudest.
What does that have to do with technical or non-technical? Isn't that just visual vs non-visual? Print designers complain about the same thing.
Personally, as someone who is technical but not visual, I know I definitely don't know what I want when putting together anything visual until I build it, because I can't form a clear enough picture in my mind of what the end product will look like. So I inevitably end up building something, being really really miserable about it, and then tweaking it until I'm only moderately sad about it.
> explaining the limits of web dev to non-technical people is a perpetual exercise in frustration
That is doing the wrong thing. These non-technical people don't need to understand "limits". They need someone with a clear process who guides them through it. Unfortunately many web devs have no process.
Print design has its own limitations but the process which people have to follow is more established.
Sometimes that works, but as a counterpoint: if your stakeholders outrank you in the org and don't care for your process or choose to ignore it, good luck!
> 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.
Many of these issues point to the same root cause: A vacuum of leadership at the executive level. Those people often don't understand the Internet, UX, etc., and thus can't and don't make good decisions, creating chaos beneath them.
For example, until recently at the New York Times, the head of social media did not use social media himself.[0] Think about that - think about how important social media is to the NYT. Imagine any competent company - much less a world leader - hiring for that position; they probably have their choice of applicants and that's who they choose? The bad news is that he no longer runs social media at the NYT, he runs the company - A.G. Sulzberger. How will the NYT and its technical side fare under that leadership? (That ignores the deep blow to morale of such nepotism as making him head of social media or, in times like this, the company - he's a scion of the family that has run the NYT for generations.)
> They wanted the website to "feel" more like a real newspaper, including things like incorporating custom layout, design and other elements on the website. Explaining the limitations of HTML, CSS and Javascript was a bit ... frustrating for both sides.
Did they demand "page turning animation" each time user clicks "next page" in the pagination?
I think 15 years ago the main misunderstanding would be that web pages have to able to flow around the dimensions of the window that the user has chosen. You can't fix things in particular places as newspaper people would be used to.
I imagine today people are more familiar with that concept.
>I imagine today people are more familiar with that concept.
You... would be surprised. I've been asked to implement "pixel perfect" designs on mid-six figure projects, and explaining that that isn't how the web works can be fruitless when their background is in traditional media.
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 work for a news company right now. Or rather, the parent company of a local news, similar to Gannett (the company that was mentioned in the article).
I've found that we have a lot of freedom, and we've recently deployed a redesigned website that we're happy with. There's definitely been a lot of frustration from arguing with all the different departments: advertising, circulation, editorial / the newsroom, but the most frustrating aspect by far has been the technical debt we still have yet to address properly.
Software that was purchased by our company several years ago for managing subscribers and their subscriptions is abysmal. It's used far beyond its scope, where generic "notes" fields are used to store critical information. For example, these systems are for print subscriptions only, so they amortize billing, and there's no email address field. We've shoehorned online subscription functionality by including email addresses in the notes field. There's no API or any sort of way to truly interact with these "systems" either, so customers are just flat-out unable to manage their own account without some middle-man manually entering form-submitted data.
Truthfully I feel that even with our redesigned website (which has gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews), we still suffer from an awful online presence. What sort of subscription service exists these days that doesn't even let you change your address without calling? It's pretty sad.
> Too many feature requests, often contradicting each other.
My last job was at a public radio station that published news online. That was one of my biggest frustrations, in part because it takes time away from properly addressing bugs or investigating what features users don't want.
> 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.
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.
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.
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, Outbrain/Taboola/whatever wants to pay you to throw their script and "suggested" stories at the bottom of the page - of course you jump at the chance to do any of these because the revenue can easily be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
Every time an AMP thread comes up, there is a minority being positive and trying to find a way to make it work, and it's for the reasons mentioned above. 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. AMP is the only reasonable alternative I've seen pitched since RSS has essentially died.
No, TV is dying not because of commercials, but because other formats of access to the content are easily accessible. There's simply no point in checking if there's anything interesting on TV now, when you can just pick a movie from a streaming service or read news on the website. After all, free online services also show a lot of ads, but this doesn't prevent us, say, from watching a music video on YouTube (one of those things that made MTV irrelevant).
There are many ways of watching TV; a lot of people I know want to have something, not necessarily a particular thing, running "in the background", as they do their chores. TV would be absolutely fine for this use if not for the ads.
Also, free on-line services "show" a lot of ads, but everyone I know deals with it using ad blockers.
Indeed, that's why TV still exists as a niche product, one among others. I'll tell you more: some people are actually watching ads or not annoyed with them enough to do something. I haven't even seen people who would bother to find an ad blocker for YouTube - they just wait those 5 secs and click "Skip" (or actually watch the ad, if it's good enough).
You do need AMP though because you don't get a little lightning bolt and special placement in results if your site is just fast but non-AMP. That is probably one of the scummier things Google does at the moment. I'm surprised they haven't been sued over it yet.
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.
Here is why: AMP is much cheaper and simpler to set up, it is way more optimized for mobile usage than trimming down your website, it brings better placement in search results and it is backed by the leading search engine itself, thus ensuring your team is not wasting resources trying to guess how Google works and how to exploit it.
And the reason Google does that--and the only reason Google pushes AMP at all--is so that they can become an intermediary between the publisher and their customers. If you're concerned about walled gardens, and you think AMP is the solution, I'd suggest you're not thinking clearly about what AMP actually is.
What AMP does is allow product ppl to use Google's authority to cut out all the script crap that Sales lobbies for, even if they have to lie a bit.
I.e., "If we don't do AMP, we'll make Google mad and sink in organic rankings" is a much stronger argument than "We ought to remove all these modals and trackers and stuff because no sane user wants this crap thrown at them."
You can't get into the top stories carousel on mobile SERPs unless you provide an AMP page and let Google cache it.
Of course, not everyone who provides an AMP page and lets Google cache it gets into that carousel, so not everyone gets the benefits. But the point is, you can't even give yourself the opportunity for that traffic bump unless you play the game exactly as Google demands.
Not simpler to set up. Quite the opposite. AMP adds complexity. It's not a new technology. It's just a set of rules what type of html/css/js your page can/must use.
It shouldn't take more work to make a simple, mobile optimized web site--it should take less work. These web sites have their developers spending effort adding all these horrible things at first, then complain that they have to turn around and spend more effort to "optimize" and be mobile friendly. Just don't add all that junk in the first place!
We just had a thread the other day about how AMP is an anachronistic, proprietary platform that breaks functionality that is otherwise completely fine for nearly all devices.
I have no particular stake in the specifics of AMP here, but X being a subset of Y does _not_ mean that X is necessarily no more complex than Y. Adding restrictions on something necessarily gives a subset of the original thing, but abiding by those restrictions may be complex.
The example that comes to mind is that every formal language on {a, b} is a subset of the regular language given by /[ab]⁎/. It's incredibly easy to recognize the latter language, but there are literally undecidable languages that are a subset of it.
In that case it is no more complex. AMP is more structured than HTML, has fewer valid tags and attributes, and has an official implementation documentation that expresses how to design the perfect AMP UI in a much more concise and simple way than the HTML docs.
That's what happened originally. Then bigger and bigger ad deals came in, then you needed more tracking to sell better deals.
The current revenue model is completely at odds with performance. If you're an established media company you can't just bail on principle and give up millions in revenue, unfortunately.
that would be awesome. but how do you expect it to happen?
AMP is actually making news easier to read in a real practical way right now. sitting back and suggesting we throw it away in exchange for idealistic nonsense that has been proven not to work by the last 20 years is not making anything better.
I'd love for AMP to be replaced by something better. but "just make nice websites" is not better. it's the status quo, and it sucks.
Break your dependence on Javascript and third-party ad networks.
If the ONLY way you can make money is to sell your user's attention span, you're doing it wrong.
Furthermore, people are willing to PAY for quality, but you also have to be willing to kick the 800 pound gorilla in the nuts.
Google is actually one of the leading reasons why, from my understanding, normal news outlet's paywalls can't actually work. If you have to leave the barn door open because otherwise no one will find you... Yeah, you're in a bad spot.
It's one of the reasons I'm increasingly moving in the direction of thinking that the ad subsidized web has pushed us into a situation where 90 percent of sites are mere aggregators\repeaters really only intended to grab ad revenue. Way back in the days of yore, it was more about getting your content out than doing a bunch of traffic with the rest of the world to facilitate botnet and monetizable surveillance.
Use the tool for what it was designed for, (information dissemination) instead of stateful information gathering, and it's amazing how much you can get done with so little.
Web 2.0 wasn't for Users. It was a breakthrough on the road to "monetizing" the Web for service providers. Further efforts to push implementation specific optimizations is just a Goliath throwing it's weight around, and trying to push the infrastructure toward a business favorable direction. Which is anti-competitive. Which is not okay.
I've never encountered an AMP site so far as I know, but the real practical way I make news easier to read is to put everything in reader mode. Simple, straightforward, lightweight, ad-free, does not depend on cooperation from the server.
Or find another way of making money (that doesn't involve the electronic equivalent of spitting at peoples' faces), and treat the free part as marketing expense.
I suggest nothing; their profit models are not my problem. If they would rather not make their content available on the open web, that's their right. If they are willing to publish their hypertext, however, I feel no obligation to follow all of the image links they offer; I'll look at the images I care about and ignore the ones I don't, because it's my computer and my attention and my time, and I'll spend it how I choose.
It's (more or less) possible to objectively measure web page performance, though. If Google started measuring how long it takes for news sites to load, and removing any sites that took longer than a certain amount from the top stories section (and added a warning in the search console that your page was being hidden), they could force publishers to change their websites without creating a new standard.
Yep. The phrase I often heard from our ad sales dept. was white space represented "leaving money on the table." Hence all of the garbage widgets, endless lead gen link lists, and difficulty finding real content.
The problem with the "AMP being the only reasonable alternative" argument is that web sites are bloated exactly because of the ads and trackers. Google wants to be seen as a white knight for something they themselves create in the first place.
AMP is a dead end, and you could as well give up altogether. For any self-respecting publisher, demonstrating such (economical, technical, and political) incompetence ruins any confidence in a minimum level of digital media competence, so what hope is there for a reader to find journalistic content worth reading?
> 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.
> AMP doesn't give Google any control over content or revenue.
It gives Google control over serving the content and how it's ranked when users search for it. That's quite a bit of sway, I'd think.
> AMP doesn't enforce a uniform interface. Its restrictions are primarily technical; not stylistic.
Most AMP pages look very similar to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does suggest that there might be some sort of technical hurdle to make content that deviates from the standard layout that Google recommends.
> It gives Google control over serving the content
Fair point. They're planning to fix this with the upcoming Web Package Standard though, so it won't be an issue for much longer.
> and how it's ranked when users search for it
That's just as true for non-AMP content.
> Most AMP pages look very similar to me.
AMP provides a bunch of prebuilt components developers can use to construct their pages, so I suspect what you're noticing here is developers just taking the path of least resistance. (Kinda like how sites built with Bootstrap tend to look similar.) With a little effort, AMP pages _can_ differentiate themselves. For example, these are all AMP pages:
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 what I'd read, and years later it didn't matter. I've never gained any lasting knowledge from the news.
Very little has changed. News has been, and is, nearly worthless.
This model wasn't that bad. Given this was print, the ads were somehow vetted - chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola) wouldn't exist, because even the shittiest of newspapers would say "What is this bullshit?" and put a stop to that. Even the people at the printing plant would be perplexed if they had to print that shit.
Going further, even the business model of chumboxes wouldn't exist - back in the days of print, ads were mostly used to sell a product; where as the point of chumboxes is to drive more eyeballs to other sites where they can look at other ads; the content itself is worthless.
Nowadays, ads are delivered programmatically from a third-party, which means the newspaper has no way to even know what garbage is going to be displayed to their readers. This is the real problem.
I have my Pi-hole set up to filter chumboxes. My feelings towards those companies verge on unadulterated hatred and anger. If I ever meet an employee of one of those companies in real life, I'm honestly afraid of what I might do.
Our local paper was the same but with dedicated days for certain types of ad. Thursday was jobs day, Friday was property day, etc.
Pre-internet days, Thursday was always a day you had to buy early if you were in the market for a new job - after 3pm it would be hard to find anywhere with a copy left to buy.
And this is the rare case where advertising works as it should - connects people offering something with people who actually, actively want that something.
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 there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. I can't imagine ever subscribing to a newspaper now.
There was so much in a newspaper that I have zero interest in or even if I did I would look somewhere else than dead trees (sports, stocks, fashion, travel, horoscopes, advice columns).
I grew up in a rural area and even in the local paper most of what was original, non-syndicated content was simply stating facts: the high school basketball team won/lost, there was a wreck, obituaries, births, weddings.
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 there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline.
No newspaper can really overcome a combination of idle cynicism and incuriosity. Perhaps you just don't like news.
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 information about the world.
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 --- computer science in our case, resurrecting dinosaurs in his --- you can fact-check the news media, and, upon spotting errors pertaining to your expertise, draw conclusions about the quality of the whole publication.
But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. However good journalists might or might not be at reporting on tech startups (and John Carreyrou seems to have done a pretty amazing job with that for WSJ), they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas, cultivating sources in state and local governments, breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and reporting on toxic fire retardants in crib mattresses.
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.
I agree there's good journalism being done but Chricton's observation is not completely off either. The nature of _most_ reporting requires that journalists talk about stuff without being adequately informed. They have to produce stuff on demand and there's little penalty to getting stuff wrong.
In any field there's going to be variability in quality and it's not fair or wise to tar the whole field with the same brush but I think journalism sometimes attracts people who have a different relationship with facts and ideas than I do.
I read a piece by a moderately famous journalist a while ago (and I've been trying to figure out who even since with no luck) who when talking about his practice said that sometimes there _are_ no experts in a particular subject and the journalist has to do a 'deep dive' and become the expert. Now he didn't say exactly what constitutes a 'deep dive' but it struck me as profoundly arrogant and symptomatic of this problem.
Sometimes they're talking about becoming experts at linear algebra† and we roll our eyes and fair enough, but sometimes they're talking about becoming "the" expert about disability compensation for West Virginia coal miners, and they aren't fucking around, that is for real.
But popping a couple frames back off the stack: the argument that most of what's in the NYT is superficial or "bullshit" is silly. Though maybe stay away from the opinion section.
What's annoying is how hard these dumb barbs are to rebut, even when they're plainly fatuous. Like, I had to go navigate through the Pulitzer categories and relay back to the thread how to do it, and all the original commenter had to do was write "the NYT and USA Today are the same thing and both are just superficial made-up trash".
† though I'm sort of waiting to spring a little quiz on the next person who takes a shot at Gladwell for "Igon Values".
I have to admit, since I'm tut-tutting at other people, that I like spoken-Gladwell much better than written-Gladwell. And it's the same style and the same stuff. It's disturbingly subjective (although it would have kept him out of Igon trouble).
He's really quite excellent at what he does, which is "writing and speaking". I don't know why it was ever supposed to be a sick burn that he didn't know what a characteristic polynomial was.
I agree with you, I think. His writing is fantastic (just, like, as a deployment of the English language) but his podcast is better than most of his New Yorker stuff and definitely than his books. I've re-listened to the university funding stuff a couple times.
I don't see how that's a silly thing to argue. Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different. You don't just call "Gell-Mann Amnesia" upon spotting a simple jargon mistake and call all news bullshit. But people have different expertise. You, me and others here know our CS; many of us also know our maths & physics, and derived specializations ranging from batteries to rocketry. We can routinely spot nonsense in news stories within those domains. Then, we all have friends who are knowledgeable in other areas. Myself, I have a historian in my circle, whose pastime is debunking nonsense written within his field of expertise. If you ask around, between yourself and your friends, you can spot the same reporting problems emerging across many domains. A pattern emerges.
That's not to say that good journalism doesn't exist. I maintain that good stories, and good journalists, are few and far between. You may read a solid, trustworthy[0] report on an important topic every year. Or every month, if you're good at curating your news experience. But these good stories are not what majority of people read most of the time; using them as defense of modern journalism is just plain motte-and-bailey. Regular people read regular news, with clickbait headlines, bad reporting, lowest-effort articles and no attempt at being accurate.
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[0] - But then, if it's not in your field, is it trustworthy or just good sounding? How can you tell?
Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different.
Hah, you can't try to sneak out of this using the tangential Gell-Mann lifeline. You said something along the lines of 'Hard to call it idle cynicism and incuriosity because [overt expression of idle cynicism and incuriosity]'. That's plainly silly.
As to this 'effect' itself, I've always found it strange it's given the weight and consideration that it sometimes is. I'm no Crichtonoscopist and I've never seen the full text of his remarks but given it was a bit in a speech delivered at the "International Leadership Forum" and arrives at the conclusion media is useless, I'm guessing it wasn't meant entirely seriously. It's a little amusing anecdote and morsel for thought in a talk - not some expression of deep insight and hard-hitting media criticism. If someone had come up with it on HN, there'd be legions of black-belt logicians leaping in to check off the fallacies (appeal to authority? confirmation bias? the dreaded 'anecdata'? plain old vanity? it's got it all).
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.
The news is horrible because journalists are almost never experts on whatever they're writing about, so whenever they write about something that might actually still have meaning in three weeks, they fuck it up.
Although I don't know your full background, that you're on this site implies you have tech experience and so can spot reporting failures in tech. This makes me think you're just experiencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [0], and trust the reporting of other topics solely because you have less experience with those topics.
If you can expect reporting to be wrong on one topic, why do you trust them to be right on other topics?
Not sure I'd agree with that. I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert.
It's just easier for people here to tell they're not experts at tech because people here are more knowledgeable about tech than they are politics or crime.
(There's also a rule/phrase for that, but I can't remember the name).
> there are better sources for those things online, at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert
What if someone did that for you, as a full-time professional job, and did it both online and offline? What if they actually spoke directly to the participants, from senators to the bus driver in the crash to the head of safety at the regulatory agency; and what if they interviewed leading experts and engineers; and read the court filings, etc. What if they made it their life's work to become expert in that kind of research?
That might be worth a few bucks a day. And it would be far more valuable than idle commentary from bloggers and commenters.
Might be, but then again, it's a rare thing. And the "idle commentary from bloggers and commenters" has the benefits that for any topic, you can find bloggers/commenters who are both subject matter experts, and have no incentive to misrepresent the story.
> bloggers/commenters who ... have no incentive to misrepresent the story
Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation. Just look at HN comments; they are among the highest quality available, but still it abounds.
> bloggers/commenters who are ... subject matter experts
> Isn't that a exceptionally idealistic given what we know about misinformation on the Internet? While we can debate the motivations, the Internet is a cesspool of misrepresentation.
I suppose the idea I'm trying to communicate can be also expressed as navigating towards localized pockets of lower misrepresentations levels in the cesspool of Internet. I'm arguing that regular news outlets have high concentration of misrepresentation, and quite frequently are the source of it.
Or: I'm not saying that if you pop on to a random subreddit you'll immediately find gold-standard, unbiased people. But I am saying that for any given domain, if you find a niche community and browse it for a bit, you'll get, on average, much better information than you'll get from reading news articles on the same topics.
Another extra feature of niche communities like various specialized subreddits, or HN, is that the experts, the pretend-experts and the wannabe-experts will engage in a discussion. This does not only help filter out obvious bullshit, but also provides extra information and can tell you when a problem is so complex it can't be accurately summarized in a headline or a short article.
That's useful to think about; I see it as a massive increase in communication channels making specialized information more available.
However, I still think it greatly underestimates the prevalence of misinformation in specialized communities (e.g., I have never found a valuable subreddit), and greatly overestimates human ability to know when they are being mislead. And the latter is far more difficult when trying to understand, as a non-expert outsider, experts in conversation about their domain. I fear what someone outside IT would walk away from HN thinking about some things. Even I have a hard time identifying the BS sometimes.
Subreddits are the answer to the philosophical question: 'Do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what they're talking about?'
> I'm no fan of crime documentaries or political coverage, but it seems almost guaranteed that there are better sources for those things online [1], at least if you know where to look and how to vet whether someone's an expert [2].
[1] Not sure about that — those "better sources online" tend to be the very journalists whom we're discussing, working for local media outlets.
[2] Assumes facts not in evidence — vetting of someone else's expertise is a non-trivial challenge, one that most of us neither want to do nor have the time to spend doing it.
[1] - better sources on-line are usually first-hand reports and the opinions of the "protagonists" of a new story.
[2] - well, a lot of people don't want to spend time vetting their sources, but this should prompt them to assign very low confidence to the things they read; of course, they frequently don't, which is why they need to be reminded that when they repeat what they read, they're most likely repeating bullshit.
Disagree. Value depends on the newspaper and the reader in question. My wife loved the ad-heavy Sunday paper inserts. I grew up reading the NYT on the subway and that (mis)set my expectations for everything else I took later (Space Coast Today for ex., the testbed of the detestable "Factoid" news). Yesterday's two threads on the death of local reporting fill in a lot of what both of us left out.
Agreed on news being nearly worthless, 99% of articles are filler and could just be summarized in a couple of sentences if not the title. In fact the title of most articles tells you everything.
I thought this was going to be about the mechanics of the newspaper industry and how much the money game has changed in the last 40 years (read: Craigslist), but all in all it sounds like you just don't like newspapers.
I work in adtech and know all the top publishers. There are 2 reasons:
1) Business. Nobody pays for news so they need to generate income from ads.
2) Bad tech (talent, infrastructure, resources, etc) on both publisher and ad vendors which creates horrible bloated pages.
That's it. Anything else is so secondary as to be insignificant. Take a look at private subscriber only sites and you'll notice how fast and pleasant they are to use, because they don't have the poorly implemented heavy cruft added to the page.
These aren’t so much questions of the online business of news so much as they are matters that speak to online news design—the look and feel of a newspaper’s website to the reader, or what a designer calls user interface and user experience. But the business and design of news are inextricably linked. As print ad revenue cratered, the need to squeeze revenue from digital sources grew. And that pushed news websites to their breaking point.
“Ads are just brutal for what they do to your browser and the sort of utter lack of regard they have for user experience,” says Ian Adelman, founding design director of Slate and current chief creative officer at New York Magazine.
Hamilton Holt's 1909 book, Commercialism and Journalism, tells the story of the incredible growth of the publishing industry, fueled by six factors, but to which Holt (a publisher himself) credited advertising for virtually all of it. And to which he had extreme and justified concerns. He quotes another journalist (anonymously, though from elsewhere, this is John Swinton):
There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
One large component is the inability of these companies to calculate the cost of the adtech on their pages.
They simply don’t have anyone who can measure the negative impact of slowing page speed, obscuring articles, increasing comics rate, scrolling jankiness, etc.
The adtech providers optimize around ease of install (one line of JavaScript!) over any costs that will entail for customers.
It's funny how they scream "free media", "support us", "internet is dying", while the core content of an article is perhaps 2-4kb of text. That's how they react when being cut off from income from tracking and advertising providers. They monetize the 2kb of text till the last drop of blood at the cost of privacy of their visitors.
I work at a educational publishing company developing interactive digital books. Everyone involved in the publishing/editorial dept. is quite frankly completely clueless about technology. Not only they don't know it works, but most importantly they couldn't care less about it.
It would not surprise me the people at the helm in large newspapers don't really care about "the experience" and still think in terms of content + ads. Heck, even Wired's website is horribly bloated and slow.
For quality news I typically pay a service like Blendle (https://blendle.com/) which curates content and gives me an ad free viewer to read the curated content.
It selects the best long form essays across publications like The Guardian, The Economist, WSJ, NYT, etc and presents to you in a nice clutter free format
Otherwise I also Desktop AMP Chrome extension which shows a AMP version of a news page where possible
I used to work for a company as a dev that owned a few papers in various areas.
Our dev team was like any other company. You had a few senior guys that were good, some decent mid level, and one or two that did notbelong.
A few people mentioned what I saw in my short time at the company, the ad ops and sales folks came up with all these ad placements and IT had to work it in, with no regards to affects on UI.
The other thing I noticed was that the people in charge had a hard time during redesigns in removing elements that people had fought to add in the first place.
Advance Local Media owns a lot of newspaper companies online presence. Their software is terrible, there are so many ads the content doesn’t load half the time.... plus with all the cutbacks over the last few years the actual articles are garbage. No details, bad writing, spelling errors, street names that are wrong, nobody proofread a these days.
Am I the only one that finds those, apparently popular with with nu-coins, pointless "featured" videos annoying?
Nevertheless, I checked the white paper and, as someone could expect nowadays, it looks like yet another attempt to ride the coin wagon though maybe a better one than others.
A data-oriented approach to hosting news and the relationships creation though seem interesting and the concepts can probably be used on the web sans coins. The user-based adding/checking/verifying process can be said is used on ./, HN and similar sites, where people will comment out any issues on the posted the article. Duplication probably exists so older articles of interest can be posted again.
> 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.
Attacking fellow users like this will get you banned on HN, even if you find their website annoying. Please don't post like this. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
As an innocent bystander, and at the risk of getting banned, I have to say I think the post you're replying to was thoughtful and had a substantive point which is that posts that use the comment section to promote their business ventures, especially those that are most likely pyramid schemes, are unwelcome.
You'd rather ban the whistleblower?
I guess you don't like the word "scam" because it assumes a value judgement?
The fact is, scams do exist, and they are promoted online, as we all well know.
In fact, this very article is about how newspaper websites have turned into advertising spam sites instead of journalism destinations.
The fact that you seem to be advocating advertising in your comment section is worrying to me.
I was attracted to HN because it doesn't feature advertising that I'm aware of (at least not with javascript turned off and an ad-blocking proxy).
If you're trying to let comment-advertisers know you're a safe space for them, I probably won't want to continue visiting.
Next you'll be telling us you make $7,000 a month working from home and here's how!
I'm glad you've noticed that HN is relatively spam-free. If you continue to read HN, you'll also notice that we don't ban people for replying to us. We ban them for breaking the site guidelines, and even then we're pretty lenient.
It's not spam when a longtime user is linking to their work in a relevant context and hasn't been making a habit of it. The two cases are trivial to tell apart if you're willing to take a minute, and it has always been ok to for users to tell others about their work this way on HN—as long as they don't overdo it. Whether you like the project or not is a separate question. As for thoughtfulness, "spam your scam elsewhere" is basically leading with a punch in the nose.
The better question is - why are newspapers so horrible?
I think that in today's age, we need to focus on a new way of presenting the data instead of converting them into narratives/prose. The problem is there's a limit to how much information you can cram into prose, or read back from it. It's hard to quickly get an overview of any particular bit of data relative to all the others that are nearby. You have to trust the news author actually understands the whole story and didn't discount anything. Plus stories aren't static, there's constant updates that are coming out, why not see all the information and the timeline all at once, continually updating? Especially in a distraction free format.
This is all tangential, but fascinating. Newspapers are the way they are because they’re still printed, and the digital version ends up straddling the line between the preexisting print format and a web site. What you’re describing only makes sense in the context of purely digital newspapers, or newspapers that are digital first, and print a distant second. A site like Axios may be a step in that direction, but it’s only scratching the surface of what could be done in that space. I would love to see something like what you described someday.
Slightly off-topic bc the NYT is clearly not the target here, but I'll say it anyway:
the webdev crew at NYT is first-rate. They've even open-sourced some cool stuff. It's a shame other papers generally can't hold a candle to the standard they set.
This is exactly what pushed me to get a Guardian subscription over a more local (U.S. based) paper (although I wish I could get the actual paper here too on more than just weekends).
Their website doesn't auto play video, I've never seen a modal, it looks okay everywhere and doesn't use too much unnecessary JavaScript that will only lead to broken menus or whatever on phones, when you have a subscription all ads go away, when you're not logged in there's no annoying paywall, and when they do ask for money it's a small banner at the bottom of articles that doesn't get in the way, doesn't cover content, etc. and to top it all off the frontend is on their GitHub account.
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?
I used to like the local newspaper's terrible site. On the rare times I went to it looking for news, they would put up a div to blur out the article if you weren't a subscriber. It was easy to just open the inspector and delete the div to read the article. Now they update their site to actually not load the article unless you subscribe. Progress...
1/ Usually through an evolutionary process the whole CMS structure for a paper becomes rather cumbersome with many patches and suboptimal services that nobody really knows about in details. Especially if the tech team rotates. And this leads to the next point.
2/ Bad administrative control of who put what on a page--sales, marketing, editors etc., and this results in a crappy experience with 50-100 different tracking garbage on every page.
As a result, almost every paper becomes a pretty ugly monster that nobody wants to touch not to ruin everything. Any potential change could lead to the whole system collapse.
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.
So, besides the many negative things I could say about how bad newspaper sites yes in fact are, I have a question: is there anywhere out there a newspaper site (even local) that IS just static HTML, with unobtrusive or nonexistent ads? Like, we only need one maybe, and we could support it. Does it exist?
I thought there was a comment in there listing some other news sites that did this (besides CNN), but I skimmed and I can't find it now so I'm probably misremembering.
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 journalism in the last 25 years - maybe the last 50 or 100 years - I doubt anything has gotten more attention than than a solution to this problem.
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.
The Washington Post is the perfect example of this.
They have two paid plans, a "Basic" one and a "Premium EU Ad-Free Subscription" promising "No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking". However, trying to subscribe to the latter still says the following:
> By subscribing, you agree to the use by us and our third-party partners of technologies such as cookies to personalize content and perform analytics. Please see our Terms of Service, Digital Products Terms of Sale and Privacy Policy for more information.
"personalize content and perform analytics" does not necessarily have anything to do with ads. Examples abound: 3rd party A/B testing (Optimizely), 3rd party analytics (Google Analytics), 3rd party error reporting (Bugsnag), 3rd party page speed testing, etc.
> By subscribing, you agree to the use by us and our third-party partners of technologies such as cookies to personalize content and perform analytics. Please see our Terms of Service, Digital Products Terms of Sale and Privacy Policy for more information.
It's not an opt-in if it's a condition of using the service. If "by using this you agree to" is an opt-in, then the definition of opt-in is meaningless.
The "opt" stands for optional. This wording is not describing an optional feature.
If thing A is optional, and thing B is permanently attached to thing B, there are a couple of ways to express this relationship. One could say "Thing B is non-optionally attached to optional thing A". One could also say "Thing B is optional, but bundled with thing A".
Some might say "Thing B is optional", because thing B is attached to thing A that is optional, and their inseparability does not change this characteristic.
I understand where you're coming from. It would be really awesome have privacy-respecting to have an "opt out of all tracking forever and just let me have the service" button, without which there's really no option at all. That's a strong, principled, justified, and completely valid position.
Yet, it's perhaps possible that different vernacular readings of the word might arrive at different, though equally valid, positions.
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.
We can blame them for much but not this. I don't even blame Google for this. The newspaper initially giving away their content for free is the "problem". Now it's to late to change people's habits.
What they should have done is only making the web site accessible for subscribers or people with a day-pass from buying a paper. The transition from paper to digital would then be more or less seamless for the consumer as they would have both for a while.
Making people realize they don't need the news papers was their mistake.
I think people want it. I do not think most news sites will reach the same number of visitors after passing a good interface. maybe people like horrible interfaces. yes i am joking. maybe i don't not.
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 department.
2. They wanted the website to "feel" more like a real newspaper, including things like incorporating custom layout, design and other elements on the website. Explaining the limitations of HTML, CSS and Javascript was a bit ... frustrating for both sides.
3. Too many opinions on what the website should look like. Ditto for even small features such as what the photo gallery and subscription pages should look like.
4. Too many feature requests, often contradicting each other. It wasn't clear who was in charge of making decisions on website changes.