Play Along At Home: Where Is This Newspaper Website From?

from the the-web-is-global,-remember dept

Earlier this year we wrote about newspapers that put up websites that don’t indicate the location they’re based in. Thanks to various news search engines, it’s increasingly common that you may end up on the website of a “local” newspaper that is anything but local to you — but where you have no clue what “local” is. Even worse, they often include generic descriptions of places (“the valley,” “the river,” “the north side”) which mean absolutely nothing to you. E-Media Tidbits is griping about another such site where even the webcam shot of “downtown” showing the local weather is perfectly ambiguous. So, we’ll let everyone play along at home: just how many clicks does it take you to figure out what’s “local” for The Truth Online.


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Comments on “Play Along At Home: Where Is This Newspaper Website From?”

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40 Comments
Happy user says:

No Subject Given

Why should anyone NEED TO click at all? I believe the point that Mike was trying to make here, was that NEWS websites should present all five of the “W’s” when posting NEWS stories.

who, what, when, why and _WHERE_

Without KNOWING all five of those “W’s”, the news is quite useless.

Thanks Mike, I was wondering when someone would say something about this — its a problem that I find all too often on the internet. A long news story may take me a few minutes to read through, and without all of the [W’s] information, I feel as though I had just wasted my time.

Wes says:

No Clicks On a Guess but one clcik to verify

I say an article on Elkart and thought it might be Elkart, Indiana. After scrolling to the bottom and clicking the Newspaper Delivery button I discovered I was right. All it takes is a little scanning and thought. But it would be nice to have something on the front page saying what community it served.

Teajai Kimsey (user link) says:

How Many Clicks?

Well, I have to admit that “The Truth” is an example of poor web identification and moderate user friendliness.

It only took me 3 clicks to find Elkhart Indiana, I found it after looking for the “about” and then finding the “delivery” information link. They might get more subscribers if their readers could find out how to get the news delivered. Go figure!

Daaltje says:

How many clicks till I knew it was from Elkart Ind

The question was How many clicks till I knew it was from Elkart Indiana? ZERO.

Haha, it was on the front page said Indiana and Elkart County. I clicked on Hometown Game story just to be sure and saw the header ELKART-

You guys maybe just cant see the trees for the forest.

LOL.. there are plenty of trees here in Washington.

ps I have had to use an old mostly spammed email. It is not safe email is it? (hidden addy) So I had to use protection. 🙂

doubledoh says:

agreed

Alot of people are missing the point. If you go to http://www.latimes.com the city and state of the paper (despite it’s fame) is in the title of the page…that’s how it should be for ALL newspapers with online versions. I shouldn’t have to try to deduce the locale by reading stories or clicking links…it should be obvious with a glance. Even The rather huge Mercury News (http://www.mercurynews.com) which covers “Bay Area” news forgets that someone else in the world that doesn’t know or live near “the bay area” might not have any idea what bay they are talking about. The idea that professional journalists are so vague and non-specific kind of makes me wonder how professional they are after all.

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