BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Thursday, August 14, 2003
The Globe's confusing new
website. Is it too soon to say that the redesign of
the
Globe's website is
seriously flawed? After all, these things do take time. So far,
though, not so good.
Aside from the look -- pinched and
cluttered, with teeny type -- I'm having a hard time figuring out
what the mission is. Ideally, you'd like to see the entire paper put
online in a well-organized manner, with perhaps a few extras. But
given that people at the Globe, like everyone else, are
presumably questioning the practice of giving away their content
online while watching their paid circulation fall, maybe they're
trying to move away from that. Still, what they're moving
toward is anything but clear.
Two observations this
morning:
1. As a paid subscriber who
receives the North Pole edition somewhere around 5:30 a.m., I often
don't get late results when the Red Sox are on the West Coast. So I
went to the online sports section a few moments ago and saw this
hype: "A's
5, Red Sox 3: Red Sox stuck in
reverse." But that wasn't
last night's game; it was Tuesday night's game.
I backed up and clicked on
"All
of today's Sports stories,"
only to find the tertiary stuff that no one reads anyway. Finally, I
backed up again, clicked on "Latest
sports news," and found
an
AP story reporting that
Derek Lowe and the Sox beat the A's, 7-3, last night.
Okay, that's better than nothing,
but still not good enough. Presumably the late edition of the
Globe has staff coverage of the game. But even though I'm a
paying customer, I can't read that coverage online.
But wait! I just went to
Boston.com,
the übersite that's separate (but not really) from the
Globe's, and the lead story was a staff-written (by
Bob
Hohler) piece on last
night's Sox win. So why couldn't I find it in the Globe's own
online sports section? Pre-emptive defense: if it's there and I just
missed it, well, believe me, I looked. This is supposed to be easy,
right?
2. If you click on "All
of today's Editorials and Op-Ed
columns," you will get
exactly what you're promised. There's also an improvement over the
old site: an editorial cartoon by Dan Wasserman. But it's
yesterday's. Again, the Globe is under no obligation to give
away its content, but the concept of publishing the day's paper on
the Web is being lost.
Am I being too harsh? Hah! On
Monday, Jason
Feifer (scroll down) wrote
to Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.org that "the paper's website has
morphed from a user-friendly digital facsimile of a newspaper into
something resembling the love child of Google news and a content-free
blog."
Then again, Feifer also doesn't
like the print edition's new pastel teaser boxes on page one, an
innovation that has given Media Log a reason to get up in the
morning. So maybe he's being unfair.
But the Globe Web folks,
having set out to fix what wasn't necessarily broken, need to do some
quick thinking. They could start by explaining exactly what it is
they're trying to accomplish.
New in this week's
Phoenix. I consider the career of Massachusetts House
Speaker Tom
Finneran, who's not looking
quite as powerful these days thanks to the rise of Governor Mitt
Romney and a small but growing rebellion in his own
chamber.
Plus, an update of Tuesday's
Media Log item on the
suspension of John
"Ozone" Osterlind, the
morning-drive-time host on WRKO Radio (AM 680) accused of wanting to
"eradicate" the Palestinians.
posted at 9:12 AM |
comment or permalink
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
