If you’re on the hunt for news in the south end of the California’s Bay Area, you’ll probably see two newspapers fighting for most of the rack space: the hometown paper, the Palo Alto Weekly and the much larger regional broadsheet, the San Jose Mercury News.
The fight is even harder on the Internet, because both papers see an advantage in what is probably a microcosm of the future battle in online journalism: The Weekly figures it can dominate local coverage with up-to-the-moment stories because it is physically close to stories; the Mercury provides fast coverage, with a larger budget to bring readers video and a broader range of columnist blogs.
Ask around about the Weekly’s Web site in town and the favorite feature is their TownSquare Forum. It’s popular for the same reason that letters to the editor used to be: people feel their opinion gets noticed. The difference on the web is that you don’t have to limit the number of letters (typically 2-3 in the print edition) for page space. Instead, a reader can comment on several stories and can do so in brief little blurbs instead of an extended letter, so that debates in the comments really resemble a discussion.
The Weekly’s site, however, has a couple of big problems. Probably the biggest for me is the ad (usually animated) sandwiched between the flag and top story. It’s a big distraction (perhaps a selling point?), since it’s just bigger than any story on the page.
Second is a personal peeve of mine, the lack of section organization. You’ll see this in the sidebar, but I believe that stories from each section should be represented on the front page, think (alert: personal bias) the Maneater, or my old high school paper.
The Merc, as its known casually, does a better job of this. The top of the front page is still dominated by local news, but sections are clear in a bar that is prominent on the page. That paper also does a skillful job of integrating blogs, with a top box that also identifies the authors I like. Ads are also well-managed here: they have a place on the page to pay the bills, but its clear the paper isn’t slave to its advertisers.
Were I to be vested with the power to change the Merc’s webpage, I’d probably tweak it just a little bit. I think they should move up their breaking news box to be right under the blogs in the right-center bar, with paper stories in the left-center where they have the video box. Really, the breaking news features are what seperates a news Web site from the paper.
I don’t know where I’d move the videos; I might just cut the number of ‘paper’ stories to the spotlight and then two more. Really, the site is pretty well-balanced, I just think the priorities could be different.
Sorry this went long, but these are both good papers and deserve a little bit of space.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment