The Readership Institute at Northwestern has some sobering stats on reader involvement in local news web sites:
I don’t think it’s realistic to expect frequent and intense use of a newspaper’s main site by a large proportion of the population. There are too many other goodies on the Web. There are many other sites that “own” categories like national and international news, sports and business, lifestyle or entertainment. A significant proportion of locals don’t care much about local news, at least not enough to seek out regular doses of it.But 62 percent of respondents said they had never visited the local newspaper’s Website, and only 14 percent said they had visited between the last seven to 30 days, numbers that have improved only a little over the last five years. The Site Usage Measurement (SUM) score for the general population is a feeble 1.26 on a 1-7 scale.
Instead of criticizing the readers for not being interested in local news, take a look at the newspaper websites. Many are awful. The pop-up ads slow everything down are are annoying. Navigation is confusing and slow. The same stories stay posted for days.
Sam,
I”m not criticizing. I’m saying this is a reality check for people who run those sites and it requires a new definition of what they can and should be, I think.
True–nearly every local newspaper website I have seen exhibits sucktitude on multiple levels: bad design, too many pop-ups, excessive advertising, lousy interactivity, and crummy or non-existent social networking integration. They seem, almost to the last, to be stuck in circa-1998 web design.
That being said, I have to wonder how easy is for the powers-that-be at local media outlets to make the changes necessary to make their sites worth going to.
Web designers are a dime a dozen, but *good* web designers are hard to come by. Moreover, if I’m running a paper (or a local TV news department), I don’t necessarily have the resources at hand to overhaul my website. Would I even know where to turn? My bet is these folks turn to the marketing department, and thus you end up with a craptacular site.
I think it’s pretty easy for those of us in the technology/web-development business to say “Make your site better, or you’re going to die.” It’s *how* a newspaper goes about doing it that is the challenge/problem, no?
Yeah, I’m going to attribute a big chunk of this to bad website design. I have some of the Chi Tribune’s blogs bookmarked because they’re virtually impossible to find from the paper’s main site. Of course, the reverse is also true.
But let’s not ignore the effects of boringness and stodginess! After all, you’ll notice that what I have bookmarked are the blogs, not the sections themselves.
I’m waiting for the first paper to blow itself up into a bunch of little media sites instead of still trying to give the 1910 morning paper experience online. In 20 years, the idea of organizing your content according to those rules will seem deeply bizarre to the average web user who never touched a paper paper and sees no reason why all these things are connected in this particular way.
I suppose there’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg thing going on here. A publisher is reluctant to make the investment required in the sites unless he knows the demand is there, but he can’t discover if there really is a long-term demand for local online services until he has made the investment. It strikes me that sites like indystar.com ARE doing a great job of providing community news sites with user involvement at their core, but is it working? Can these things ever be more than a passing fancy for people? Do enough people really care about their area? And is the online user not something of a contrarian anyway, always more willing to favour the startup to the established, traditional publisher?
“Feeble.” What a great word…
Local news web sites don’t give me anything I crave.
Most of the “news” found there are just AP stories recycled. I read those somewhere else already. (Via blogs I like pointing to other sources…)
The weather I get from weather.com. Or I look outside.
The local stories are run from a dry, rules-driven, committeed template – i.e, they all sound the same. “Des Moines man drowns at Gray’s Lake.”
Ads? No way. I go to Craigslist.
Cartoons? They’re rarely funny. Political cartoons? They’re rarely insightful.
In short, there’s no compelling reason to return again and again. There are no tools there to make me more successful. There’s no entertainment value to keep me interested. There’s no community to make me feel like I belong.
Occasionally, there is a local story in which I’m interested that I can’t get anywhere else. But I never hear about it first from the local news site, and finding the story there is not always straightforward.
Here’s what I would do: find the clearest opinionated writers you can find, and turn them loose on either local or national stories. Make it about well-performed debate that informs me through the discussion. Have them interact with each other.
Local news sites think they do that today, but it’s just one-hand clapping for it heavy leftist emphasis. Yawn.
Show me the debate in the editorial room. Celebrate diversity and have conservatives, liberals, libertarians, socialists… throw all of them in the mix.
Have this clear-writing crew read/link/comment with every local blogger. It’s about finding/engaging/attracting passionate users who will reciprocate. By golly, what if the local news site pointed to me occasionally?
Have the clear-writing crew ditch the stupid news templates and write from the heart. Have them focus on telling a story. Give me passion.
Make search so simple and comprehensive that I can easily find what I need.
But that will never happen. Too much change. It breaks the rules.
I could be wrong, but you know what? Shake it up and find out.
Pivoting off Confiteor’s point, no successful entrepreneur worries about that chicken-egg thing. Entrepreneurs aren’t afraid to risk. That’s how you learn about the market and find a solution. Maybe news sites aren’t entrepreneurial. If so, then they won’t be in business long.
[...] Jump Starting Local Newspapers Jeff Jarvis calls it the Shrug Problem. [...]
Suckitude: deep-sixing all past reader comments (and permalinks) when you do a site redesign. Requiring javascript to view comments. Providing no way for the community to filter comments for value. Treating (via the display) all comments like the muck that so many of them are.
(I don’t know how much of this my area’s paper is still doing, I don’t visit their site much anymore)
“I suppose there’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg thing going on here. A publisher is reluctant to make the investment required in the sites unless he knows the demand is there, but he can’t discover if there really is a long-term demand for local online services until he has made the investment.”
By the same logic, you might as well not buy a printing press until you have enough subscribers to justify it…