30 ms·

Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?

263 points by joegahona 8y ago

samspenc 8y ago
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.
- expertentipp 8y ago
  > 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?
  - gameswithgo 8y ago
    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.
    - annabellish 8y ago
      >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.
      - expertentipp 8y ago
        Oh boy, the "pixel perfect" storm period couple of years ago. Luckily I waiter it over on cozy position without a need of looking for a job.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    In the early days of the web, lots of print-originating online outlets, did.
- zebraflask 8y ago
  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.
  - hobs 8y ago
    Often considered "bike shedding" https://phinze.github.io/2014/05/24/useful-tech-terms-part-1.html https://phinze.github.io/2014/05/24/useful-tech-terms-part-1... When you are working on minor details, everyone has an opinion. When you are working on major difficult things, nobody wants to weigh in.
  - qznc 8y ago
    > 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.
    - zebraflask 8y ago
      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!
  - paultopia 8y ago
    > 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.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  > 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.
  - jasoncartwright 8y ago
    Slight aside: Django came out of a local newspaper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)#History
    - knowtheory 8y ago
      Right, and it's still sad to say that they capitalized on that fact so incredibly poorly that the following came to pass: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/1012781017940316161 https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/1012781017940316161 > The Lawrence Journal-World, where Django was created, is now a Wordpress site. http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/jun/26/redesign-ljworld/ http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/jun/26/redesign-ljworld/
      - always_good 8y ago
        Or they realized that there isn't much value in building their own CMS.
        ubernostrum 8y ago
        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.
- ravenstine 8y ago
  > 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.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  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.) [0] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journalism/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journal...
  - ACow_Adonis 8y ago
    To be fair, it's generally accepted knowledge that drug dealers and producers probably shouldn't be consuming their own product.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  I worked with a major news network on a UI prototype/hack which effectively destroyed and remounted the entire DOM after load.... and they put it into production as-is.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  > 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.
  - firebones 8y ago
    What's an example of a good news website that uses Jekyll or WordPress?
    - CharlesW 8y ago
      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.
    - qwerty456127 8y ago
      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.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  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?
  - jumelles 8y ago
    I don't think they ever will, but it would be incredible if the New York Times open-sourced their tools. https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digital-first-newsroom-f1cb8367fc21 https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digita... https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scoop-a-glimpse-into-the-nytimes-cms/ https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scoop-a-glimpse-in...
    - twsted 8y ago
      Oak is based on the open source and very good ProseMirror.
  - jinglebells 8y ago
    Like The Guardian? https://github.com/guardian/frontend https://github.com/guardian/frontend
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  > Too many feature requests, often contradicting each other. It wasn't clear who was in charge of making decisions on website changes. This is the default state of every software project that doesn't have an unusually mature customer. It is your job to try to be an unusually mature supplier and make these tradeoffs explicit to them.
- KuhlMensch 8y ago
  15 years ago is a long time ago.
- kminehart 8y ago
  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.
rmason 8y ago
Building a newspaper business for the digital age is a hard problem that has yet to be solved.
- sparkzilla 8y ago
  Check what we are up to at NewsBlocks: http://newsblocks.io http://newsblocks.io
  - llao 8y ago
    > 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. Spam your scam elsewhere.
    - sparkzilla 8y ago
      1) It's directly related to the OP 2) Why is it a scam?
      - sciurus 8y ago
        1) It's an ICO 2) See 1
    - dang 8y ago
      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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - jakeinsf 8y ago
        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!
pictur 8y ago
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.
- pictur 8y ago
  why do you give this comment a negative score? Are you a newspaper site employee? :)
phjesusthatguy3 8y ago
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.
- vntok 8y ago
  Lots of newspapers paywall their online content.
  - dazc 8y ago
    ...and still have mostly ads.
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      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. Yeah, no thanks.
      - vntok 8y ago
        "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.
        ryandrake 8y ago
        It's still something you should be able to opt out of, or have to opt in to.
sanj 8y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It's most likely on purpose. Adtech is as much about making you money as it is about making you think that it's making you money.
lllr_finger 8y ago
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.
- TekMol 8y ago
  AMP is the only reasonable alternative I've seen How about making the site fast and usable in the first place?
  - vntok 8y ago
    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.
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      w3c is an easier standard than amp
      - vntok 8y ago
        That cannot possibly be true, as AMP is literally a subset of HTML.
expertentipp 8y ago
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.
bluedino 8y ago
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.
dredmorbius 8y ago
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. https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft This from a lecture series at the University of California, Berkeley, on the Morals of Trade. Selling news has been a tricky busines from the start. Circulation has been falling consistently for a while now: https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure2.png https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure2.png
tempodox 8y ago
Quick and simplistic answer to the titular question: Because they‘re not newspapers but petri dishes for online advertising.
showkiller 8y ago
The business model is driving these poor choices. This article addresses the business model which I believe would make room for better site experiences. https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/ https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/
mpax 8y ago
I think historians will look back on this era and point society’s decline towards two companies, they both start with “Go”.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  ... which co. Is the not Google one?
  - dazc 8y ago
    Guessing it's also Google?
  - axedwool 8y ago
    Goldman Sachs?
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      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.
redleggedfrog 8y ago
Why are newspapers so horrible? 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.
- dazc 8y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    And this is the rare case where advertising works as it should - connects people offering something with people who actually, actively want that something.
- some_random 8y ago
  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.
  - ape4 8y ago
    They aren't experts at tech but are the best a local news, politics, crime, etc
    - CM30 8y ago
      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).
pier25 8y ago
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.
- user1324345 8y ago
  Gotta be a startup opportunity somewhere here
dazc 8y ago
My local newspaper site works just fine with javascript disabled and with 20 or so tracking urls blocked in my hosts file.
lwhi 8y ago
I find it ironic the site has a big cookie modal you need to accept before reading anything.
- danso 8y ago
  I don't see it. Is for EU users only?
  - Kalium 8y ago
    Yup, it's a GDPR-driven options configuration thing.
erazor42 8y ago
Oh the irony of reading this article on a website full of ads
jccalhoun 8y ago
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...
- mikro2nd 8y ago
  Disable JS on their site. Problem solved.
- manigandham 8y ago
  That actually is real progress... I'm not sure why its a problem if the content is meant for subscribers.
SamWhited 8y ago
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. I wish other papers would follow this model.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
you ain't seen nothin yet
Tpsoc 8y ago
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.
rossdavidh 8y ago
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?
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  While there is some javascript in there, wikinews is pretty much a static website. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page
- epiapp 8y ago
  I don't know if it counts, but there's lite.cnn.io Besides that, I just disable javascript for The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, etc.
  - bentrevor 8y ago
    There is also https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ , which was discussed here about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342758 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.
- Double_a_92 8y ago
  https://eu.usatoday.com https://eu.usatoday.com Seems pretty nice after they were "forced" to remove all the nasty scripts.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
rado 8y ago
Funny you should ask, modal-window toting Citylab.
iainmerrick 8y ago
Turn JavaScript off and most of them are fine.
chrisweekly 8y ago
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.
- fsck--off 8y ago
  The NYT website has gotten worse and worse over the years. Decreased contrast, JS bloat, hamburger menu, etc.
manigandham 8y ago
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.
- unreal37 8y ago
  ^ This. I worked at one of the large TV/news companies in Canada, and the analytics and ad code was literally 80% of the code of our sites. Turning them off took a 10 second load time down to 1 second. Not even kidding. These websites are mostly adtech code from 30 different sources.
- azernik 8y ago
  That is the conclusion of the article as well: ============= 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.
toddsiegel 8y ago
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.
- procinct 8y ago
  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.
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
Citylab.com is just as horrible...
MisterTea 8y ago
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.
fouc 8y ago
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.
- mwfunk 8y ago
  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.
jblow 8y ago
s/Newspaper//g
amarand 8y ago
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?
pkstn 8y ago
https://twitter.com/pakastin/status/1039020252791795712 https://twitter.com/pakastin/status/1039020252791795712
dedalus 8y ago
For quality news I typically pay a service like Blendle (https://blendle.com/ 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 (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amp-accelerated-mobile-pa/abbbnefchbpffkbnadnopdahjcmbheho?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amp-accelerated-mo...)
Mikho 8y ago
I guess there are two problems: 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.

263 points by joegahona 8y ago

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.

expertentipp 8y ago
> 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?
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  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.
  - annabellish 8y ago
    >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.
    - expertentipp 8y ago
      Oh boy, the "pixel perfect" storm period couple of years ago. Luckily I waiter it over on cozy position without a need of looking for a job.
- coldtea 8y ago
  In the early days of the web, lots of print-originating online outlets, did.
zebraflask 8y ago
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.
- hobs 8y ago
  Often considered "bike shedding" https://phinze.github.io/2014/05/24/useful-tech-terms-part-1.html https://phinze.github.io/2014/05/24/useful-tech-terms-part-1... When you are working on minor details, everyone has an opinion. When you are working on major difficult things, nobody wants to weigh in.
- qznc 8y ago
  > 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.
  - zebraflask 8y ago
    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!
- paultopia 8y ago
  > 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.
ryandrake 8y ago
> 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.
- jasoncartwright 8y ago
  Slight aside: Django came out of a local newspaper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)#History
  - knowtheory 8y ago
    Right, and it's still sad to say that they capitalized on that fact so incredibly poorly that the following came to pass: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/1012781017940316161 https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/1012781017940316161 > The Lawrence Journal-World, where Django was created, is now a Wordpress site. http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/jun/26/redesign-ljworld/ http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/jun/26/redesign-ljworld/
    - always_good 8y ago
      Or they realized that there isn't much value in building their own CMS.
      - ubernostrum 8y ago
        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.
ravenstine 8y ago
> 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.
forapurpose 8y ago
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.) [0] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journalism/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journal...
- ACow_Adonis 8y ago
  To be fair, it's generally accepted knowledge that drug dealers and producers probably shouldn't be consuming their own product.
microcolonel 8y ago
I worked with a major news network on a UI prototype/hack which effectively destroyed and remounted the entire DOM after load.... and they put it into production as-is.
qwerty456127 8y ago
> 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.
- firebones 8y ago
  What's an example of a good news website that uses Jekyll or WordPress?
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    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.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    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.
BurningFrog 8y ago
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?
- jumelles 8y ago
  I don't think they ever will, but it would be incredible if the New York Times open-sourced their tools. https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digital-first-newsroom-f1cb8367fc21 https://open.nytimes.com/building-a-text-editor-for-a-digita... https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scoop-a-glimpse-into-the-nytimes-cms/ https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/scoop-a-glimpse-in...
  - twsted 8y ago
    Oak is based on the open source and very good ProseMirror.
- jinglebells 8y ago
  Like The Guardian? https://github.com/guardian/frontend https://github.com/guardian/frontend
BurningFrog 8y ago
> Too many feature requests, often contradicting each other. It wasn't clear who was in charge of making decisions on website changes. This is the default state of every software project that doesn't have an unusually mature customer. It is your job to try to be an unusually mature supplier and make these tradeoffs explicit to them.
KuhlMensch 8y ago
15 years ago is a long time ago.
kminehart 8y ago
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.

rmason 8y ago

Building a newspaper business for the digital age is a hard problem that has yet to be solved.

sparkzilla 8y ago
Check what we are up to at NewsBlocks: http://newsblocks.io http://newsblocks.io
- llao 8y ago
  > 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. Spam your scam elsewhere.
  - sparkzilla 8y ago
    1) It's directly related to the OP 2) Why is it a scam?
    - sciurus 8y ago
      1) It's an ICO 2) See 1
  - dang 8y ago
    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. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - jakeinsf 8y ago
      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!

pictur 8y ago

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.

pictur 8y ago
why do you give this comment a negative score? Are you a newspaper site employee? :)

phjesusthatguy3 8y ago

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.

vntok 8y ago
Lots of newspapers paywall their online content.
- dazc 8y ago
  ...and still have mostly ads.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    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. Yeah, no thanks.
    - vntok 8y ago
      "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.
      - ryandrake 8y ago
        It's still something you should be able to opt out of, or have to opt in to.

sanj 8y ago

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.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
It's most likely on purpose. Adtech is as much about making you money as it is about making you think that it's making you money.

lllr_finger 8y ago

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.

TekMol 8y ago
AMP is the only reasonable alternative I've seen How about making the site fast and usable in the first place?
- vntok 8y ago
  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.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    w3c is an easier standard than amp
    - vntok 8y ago
      That cannot possibly be true, as AMP is literally a subset of HTML.

expertentipp 8y ago

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.

bluedino 8y ago

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.

dredmorbius 8y ago

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. https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft This from a lecture series at the University of California, Berkeley, on the Morals of Trade. Selling news has been a tricky busines from the start. Circulation has been falling consistently for a while now: https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure2.png https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure2.png

tempodox 8y ago

Quick and simplistic answer to the titular question: Because they‘re not newspapers but petri dishes for online advertising.

showkiller 8y ago

The business model is driving these poor choices. This article addresses the business model which I believe would make room for better site experiences. https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/ https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/

mpax 8y ago

I think historians will look back on this era and point society’s decline towards two companies, they both start with “Go”.

rightbyte 8y ago
... which co. Is the not Google one?
- dazc 8y ago
  Guessing it's also Google?
- axedwool 8y ago
  Goldman Sachs?
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    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.

redleggedfrog 8y ago

Why are newspapers so horrible? 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.

dazc 8y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  And this is the rare case where advertising works as it should - connects people offering something with people who actually, actively want that something.
some_random 8y ago
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.
- ape4 8y ago
  They aren't experts at tech but are the best a local news, politics, crime, etc
  - CM30 8y ago
    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).

pier25 8y ago

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.

user1324345 8y ago
Gotta be a startup opportunity somewhere here

dazc 8y ago

My local newspaper site works just fine with javascript disabled and with 20 or so tracking urls blocked in my hosts file.

lwhi 8y ago

I find it ironic the site has a big cookie modal you need to accept before reading anything.

danso 8y ago
I don't see it. Is for EU users only?
- Kalium 8y ago
  Yup, it's a GDPR-driven options configuration thing.

erazor42 8y ago

Oh the irony of reading this article on a website full of ads

jccalhoun 8y ago

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...

mikro2nd 8y ago
Disable JS on their site. Problem solved.
manigandham 8y ago
That actually is real progress... I'm not sure why its a problem if the content is meant for subscribers.

SamWhited 8y ago

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. I wish other papers would follow this model.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

you ain't seen nothin yet

Tpsoc 8y ago

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.

rossdavidh 8y ago

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?

wodenokoto 8y ago
While there is some javascript in there, wikinews is pretty much a static website. https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page
epiapp 8y ago
I don't know if it counts, but there's lite.cnn.io Besides that, I just disable javascript for The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, etc.
- bentrevor 8y ago
  There is also https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ , which was discussed here about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342758 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.
Double_a_92 8y ago
https://eu.usatoday.com https://eu.usatoday.com Seems pretty nice after they were "forced" to remove all the nasty scripts.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

rado 8y ago

Funny you should ask, modal-window toting Citylab.

iainmerrick 8y ago

Turn JavaScript off and most of them are fine.

chrisweekly 8y ago

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.

fsck--off 8y ago
The NYT website has gotten worse and worse over the years. Decreased contrast, JS bloat, hamburger menu, etc.

manigandham 8y ago

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.

unreal37 8y ago
^ This. I worked at one of the large TV/news companies in Canada, and the analytics and ad code was literally 80% of the code of our sites. Turning them off took a 10 second load time down to 1 second. Not even kidding. These websites are mostly adtech code from 30 different sources.
azernik 8y ago
That is the conclusion of the article as well: ============= 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.

toddsiegel 8y ago

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.

procinct 8y ago
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.

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

Citylab.com is just as horrible...

MisterTea 8y ago

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.

fouc 8y ago

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.

mwfunk 8y ago
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.

jblow 8y ago

s/Newspaper//g

amarand 8y ago

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?

pkstn 8y ago

https://twitter.com/pakastin/status/1039020252791795712 https://twitter.com/pakastin/status/1039020252791795712

dedalus 8y ago

For quality news I typically pay a service like Blendle (https://blendle.com/ 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 (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amp-accelerated-mobile-pa/abbbnefchbpffkbnadnopdahjcmbheho?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amp-accelerated-mo...)

Mikho 8y ago

I guess there are two problems: 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.