October 6, 2006
Advice for newspaper web sites
Doc Searls offers ten tips for making newspaper web sites more user friendly. Let’s take a quick look (my summary of his ideas):
- Stop charging for the old news. Paywalls bad. Open access good (for business!).
- Feature archived stuff on the paper’s web site. It’s called background and context (i.e. good journalism). And the web makes it easy to offer comprehensive coverage of an issue over time with the wonder of hyperlinks.
- Link outside the paper. Only the ossified, industrial-aged profession of journalism could fail to see how important this is.
- Link to other local journalists, bloggers, and publications. Be the hub, baby! Be the place readers go to first.
- Use the best local bloggers as stringers. Hey, they’re good! And smart. And some of them have audiences larger than your columnists.
- Get citizen journalists involved. They can cover the micro-scenes that daily journalism largely ignores. But it’s important to readers.
- Stop calling everything content. Doc says it best: “Your job is journalism, not container cargo.”
- Uncomplicate your web sites. UGLY! Hard to navigate. Slow to load. Geez, hire some local kid who knows more about this stuff than your so-called IT guys. This ain’t rocket science.
- Get hip to the live web. It’s all about RSS and interactivity.
- Publish for readers who use hand-held browsers. Be cool.
Posted by acline | October 6, 2006 | Posted in: Uncategorized |
