Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible?
8th September 2018
When Emily Goligoski’s parents want to read their local newspaper, the two Ohioans load up the PDF version of the print newspaper on their iPad and scroll through, “turning” digitally pixelated pages instead of reading the stories from the paper’s website.
“My parents refuse to access the website because it’s just so painful to look at,” says Goligoski, a veteran of Mozilla and former user experience research lead for The New York Times.
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The torments of these sites are well known: clunky navigation, slow page-loading times, browser-freezing autoplaying videos, a siege of annoying pop-up ads, and especially those grids of bottom-of-the-page “related content” ads hawking belly fat cures and fake headlines (what’s known as Internet chum). Put another way: Why must newspaper websites suck so damn much?
One might more usefully ask ‘why do newspapers suck so danm much?’ I rather think that the two are related.
One sees a similar degeneration in popular music radio. Where once local DJs curated content to local tastes and developed serious fan followings, nowadays the local franchise of National Radio Network runs centrally-produced content that is blandified to match the Marketing Department’s guess about what appeals to the lowest common denominator, interrupted occasionally by automatically inserted ads that may or may not have any relationship to the content. That’s certainly cheaper, and it’s all about the bottom line. You want healthy food, try Whole Paycheck — you ain’t gonna find it at Grocery Barn.