When I started this sabbatical I restarted my Boston Globe subscription, the paper kind. I was hopping to use it to find things to do around town. That didn't really happen. My brain is so trained to skip over the ads I missed a lot. And looking through the calendar section was painful, too many listings to find just the good stuff. The articles were ok, but as you might have guessed, I get a lot of news by reading blogs and seeing links to articles. What I found in the paper was yesterday's news. About the only thing I regularly did was the sudoku and I still like it better on paper than any of the software versions I've seen (taking notes in the boxes is too cumbersome in most).
So last friday was my last issue and of course that's the day they did a new design of the paper. Nope, I didn't change my mind, even with the color comics every day (it only took about 100 years for this to happen). And of course I can still read it online, though I find scanning a newspaper's site for interesting articles, harder than scanning a paper page. Today I sent them email about all the issues I have with the design of their front page (among other things, why are obituaries above national and world news?)
The news Tuesday was that the Christian Science Monitor will end daily publication of their paper edition and exist solely online, well they'll have a weekend paper edition, I wonder how long that will last. It only makes sense that we start delivering information via the internet instead of dripping ink on dead trees each day and trucking them around. The hard part is figuring out the business model for reporting. NPR's On Point did a good episode on the topic yesterday.
We need reporters covering local things and some covering national things and some doing investigative work. We don't need a movie reviewer at every paper though we need people covering local arts events. Local sports coverage too (that's schools and the local pro teams), but how many need to cover national events like tennis, golf, etc. Ideally I'd like to see something like the Huffington Post where different people post on different topics and over time some build up good reputations. But I want a site that's easy to navigate, to find new things that I'm interested in and weed out the stuff I'm not, that means good metadata and good ways to use it. It still annoys me that there's no easy way to say read everything in this blog except the political stuff. I also want this on event sites. I don't want to see just music, I want to see everything but music, or more precisely lots of things but none of the bands playing at college bars and clubs that fill up all the listings.
Hmmm, I guess this needs more design...
No comments:
Post a Comment