Where Am I?
Thinking of last month’s meetup, where our homework was to post our favorite RSS feeds…
My feeds this morning contained this little tidbit from TechDirt (which pointed to another story at Poynter.org) complaining about newspaper websites that don’t give you the whole picture, as it were. Frequently missing items from their webpages are the little details you’d expect from a daily newspaper, like actual reference links, your location…
OK, you pause, wait a minute, does a newspaper really have to tell me where they’re located? I mean, they serve a particular area — and that’s it — right? Right.
And Wrong: newspapers generally serve a single, particular geographical area — on paper. On the Net, they receive viewers from all over the world: so if you’re reading the Athens newspaper, and they’re referring to a pending repaving job on Main Street, it’d be nice to know that you’re visiting Athens, Ohio, or Athens, Georgia (US — not Russia), and not Athens, Greece.
Consider Cleveland; are you in:
- Cleveland, Alabama
- Cleveland, Florida
- Cleveland, Georgia
- Cleveland, Illinois
- Cleveland (Township), Michigan
- Cleveland, Minnesota
- Cleveland, Missouri
- Cleveland, Mississippi
- Cleveland (County) Oklahoma
- Cleveland, Tennessee
- Cleveland, Utah
– or right here in Cleveland, Ohio?
Gotcha there, didn’t I? Bet you didn’t know there were so many places with the name “Cleveland,” did you?
Evidently WABC Radio in Cleveland, Tennessee thinks they are the only one with this distinction; unless you see the weather link somewhere in the page, you have no idea that you’re visiting a page originating from Cleveland, Tennessee. At least the Cleveland Daily Banner has their location right smack dab in the middle of their masthead.
Unfortunately, our own cleveland.com is guilty of this misstep as well; I’m not surprised by this, however, as their design is still mired in table-based, image-laden, 1994 — complete with deprecated <font>, <marquee> and <blink> tags. “Web Standards? We don’t need no stinkin’ Web Standards!” It’s fugly and extremely difficult to navigate. But… I digress…
The same holds true for The News-Herald, except if you look in the menu, “Ohio Lottery” is a clear navigation link that gives the one — and the only — clue as to site origin. The only thing the News-Herald site doesn’t have that cleveland.com has are those blasted <marquee> and <blink> tags. Now about those damned flashing ads…
I would prefer to think of this as a lack of thought and planning rather than arrogance — which it could easily be. Lack of thought is easier to justify than arrogance, as arrogance would inply that everyone in the world should know that The Plain Dealer serves Cleveland, Ohio, and nowhere else. If I wasn’t from Cleveland, Ohio, and had I never attended Journalism School, and had I never seen The Plain Dealer, I wouldn’t have a clue.
Obviously, many old-school media still haven’t enlarged their daily world view to think that they might actually be engaging the entire world rather than their limited geographical area, as if their websites only reach as far as their trucks drive on a daily basis! You know, somehow the signal must die, like radio or TV waves.
If only that were so.
The lack of an inclusive world view renders many media web outlets irrelevant, and this poses as one argument in the change in reader habits from printed news to web news; those that are getting it right are succeeding (for the most part), and those getting it wrong are fighting a losing battle. Unfortunately, for a media outlet to change its world view requires that it change its daily local view, which frequently entails a changed philosophy, an altered approach to what is — and what is not — news.
In the Cleveland media arena, the Plain Dealer hasn’t accomplished this yet. The News-Herald is struggling with this (at least they’re trying!), but one look at both their hard-copy and electronic editions reveals that they are totally lost on this battlefield. The folks lower down in the company ranks recognize that relevance insists that they place local news and events on the site, while management has yet to realize that Content is King.
Yes, I’m actually linking to Bill Gates here: what he states in this piece, written in 1996 — nearly a century ago in Internet Time — was pure prophecy. The Internet changed the definition of relevance to a more global, inclusive schema.
Now, the News-Herald is not totally at fault here: JRC disallows more than 2 stories of local news on affiliates’ web sites per day; this alone curdles the News-Herald’s bread-and-butter on the web. JRC is just another fine organization suffering from a misinformed — and miscalculated — world view.
In the end, after all of the apples have fallen from the tree, it looks like failure to provide relevance will kill a media business. Only time will tell, but I think irrelevance will close a lot of mainstream newspapers in the near future. I give them ten years, very generously.
