Comments on TEMPLE TALK: How good are newspaper Web sites? A test of Eppy w...

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Kudos to the executive editor for accepting the cr...

2009-07-24T07:05:04.589-10:00

Kudos to the executive editor for accepting the criticism and pledging to change. JOA setups seem to be an especially frustrating hindrance to innovation. AZStarnet has done some innovative reporting despite being hobbled by site design. Of particular note is a mash-up they use to stream live video from an event with an adjacent Twitter feed to display comments from readers and reporters at the scene.

Here's hoping the new CMS and redesign are a roaring success.

Curt Chandler
senior lecturer/multimedia
Penn State university

Ahhh, the folly of reporters (or ex-publishers) us...

2009-07-21T15:07:30.739-10:00

Ahhh, the folly of reporters (or ex-publishers) using Wikipedia.

I can’t quibble with most of your review, but Test #3 has some problems.

There is no Casas Adobes. It’s a neighborhood in the unincorporated county. There was an effort to incorporate it and the surrounding area in 1997 that was rejected by the courts.

It has a Census CDP because the fledgling town had requested a Census count in 1997 for tax purposes (Arizona has a per capita state shared revenue system based) and the incorporation effort was still hung up in the courts when the 2000 count was being done.

You didn’t find any stories about Casas Adobes because it doesn’t exist, there’s nothing to write about. The suburban towns in the metro area are Oro Valley, Marana and Sahuarita. If you search those keywords, you get stories about them. Plus, a large chunk of what is included in the Casas Adobes CDP has been annexed by Marana and Oro Valley.

Also, the ZIP you gave in your post is for Willcox, Ariz., which is about 90 miles from Tucson. The ZIP for most of Casas Adobes is 85704. If you click on that ZIP, you get several stories and calendar items.

So you should redo your test or give the ADS a pass for #3.

And I’m not an ADS employee. I work for what’s left of the Tucson Citizen, which used to be the Star’s primary news competitor.

Mark B. Evans

2009-07-20T17:16:36.715-10:00

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John: Your critique of our site is fair and p...

2009-07-20T15:06:54.944-10:00

John:

Your critique of our site is fair and points up useability problems that frustrate both our readers and the newsroom. We've tacked on lots of new content, but little work has been done the past few years on StarNet's design and infrastructure.

Tucson's joint operating agreement came to an end in May, which means the Star's news site can now get access to the development resources we know it requires. (Under the JOA, our programmers, designers and other behind-the-scenes staff supported two news sites plus a third site for the business agency.)

We'll unveil a redesign and new search functions, along with a new content management system and other improvements this fall. We hope you'll retest us then.

So how did we win best news Web site? The contest judged our news content, not the useability of the site. Cleary, they should go hand-in-hand we need to excel at both.

Bobbie Jo Buel
executive editor, Arizona Daily Star

July 20, 2009 6:54 PM

It's important that top editors and publishers...

2009-07-20T08:11:55.119-10:00

It's important that top editors and publishers hear from the journalists on the front lines every day. The following comes from a Web journalist in his 20s working on the Web site of a print publication. I think his voice is worth listening to. I am posting this anonymously for him because he doesn't want to jeopardize his job. The following is an excerpt of his e-mail to me.

"Thank God you wrote what you did about the Arizona Daily Star -- not to pick on them, but because it's just so perfect to show that an award-winning newspaper Web site is still a terrible Web site. I see this constantly in the newsrooms I've worked in -- people pat themselves on the back for making the tiniest changes, things that a reader would actually consider close to a bug fix than an upgrade (especially on a site that already looks ca. 1999) -- so they are always running five or so years behind mainstream thinking about how Web sites should look, feel, work, etc.

"The problems also include a tick-the-box mentality -- we have a list of most-read stories; we have a restaurant list; we have a search button -- that doesn't consider whether those "features" actually even work for the readers. Who cares if you have all these things available if it's a huge pain to use them, or they don't even really work? But too many people in positions of authority either don't want to think about that or are incapable of doing so. And then there is the problem of editors being defensive -- oh we don't WANT to put too many links on the inside pages because we want people to go to our main page. News flash: making a Web site harder to use does not mean people will work harder to use it -- it means they will give up on it more quickly, and thus hurt your audience and revenue.

"It's all just obscenely frustrating. I know how massively most news orgs are failing the Web test. Painful."

John, I'm not sure site design is as importan...

2009-07-20T08:04:25.921-10:00

John,

I'm not sure site design is as important as it was even a few years ago. What is important is making site friendly to aggregators and allowing users to build up trust with individuals on the staff and to track ongoing stories (think plethora of RSS), and you are right the Washington Post does this far better than most.

John, thank you for pointing out the location of t...

2009-07-20T06:55:24.207-10:00

John, thank you for pointing out the location of the contact information. But I still give the site a failing grade on this score because none of the links you describe are hot. I don't want to copy somebody's e-mail address to connect with them. I think it's reasonable to expect a site to make the e-mail, and frankly the twitter address, clickable. They're not. If I'm incorrect about that, please let me know.

Maybe if the Star's editors actually focused o...

2009-07-20T06:55:04.982-10:00

Maybe if the Star's editors actually focused on designing a functional Web site past 1993 Web standards and stopped hanging on their laurels of fake awards, they would actually grow readership.

The Star's Web site is an abomination, one that the staff widely regards as an embarrassment. I'm sure that a handful of "senior editors," who don't know what good Web design was if it him them over the head, think everything's hunky-dory. And I'm sure they probably ignore stinging criticism from their own reporters and readers because "they know best."

It's a huge problem when you cannot effectively search for articles, wait 30 seconds at times for a page to load, read tables as garbled text, get thrown 404 errors, or are unable to navigate, say, the mobile site. Someone in Tucson needs to wake up, and fast.

"I could not figure out how to contact the re...

2009-07-20T06:18:44.428-10:00

"I could not figure out how to contact the reporter on a story page."

I'm not defending the Star's site, because I agree it's a horror. (And I live in Tucson.)

But you get a Fail for not finding contact information for a story's author at the bottom of the story. It lists a phone number, email address, and, in the case of one reporter I noticed recently, a Twitter account.

John, I wish you gone thru the process of placing...

2009-07-20T05:18:37.990-10:00

John,

I wish you gone thru the process of placing a classifed ad and comparing that process with Craigs List.

I am sure the result would have been a double fail.

2009-07-19T20:56:44.100-10:00

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