Al Diamon
Tangled Web
The more things change: The problem with the Bangor Daily News’ old Web site was you had to look in at least three places just to check on the top stories of the day.
Some were at the top of the home page.
Some were near the bottom.
Some were hidden in tiny type in the regional links at the very bottom.
There didn’t seem to be any particular reason why stories that merited the top of the front page in the print edition ended up buried on the Down East or Penquis pages online. Local video was rare. Graphics were often primitive. The overall effect was clumsy. It looked a decade out of date.
I’m glad it’s gone. Except that what’s replaced it isn’t much of an improvement.
The new site, refurbished as of Aug. 22, now features some of the top stories from the print edition in a shifting selection on the home page. But it shifts a little too quickly, so read fast. Even if the page was slowed down, the sub-headlines on each story aren’t long enough to reveal what the articles are about and are often cut off in mid-sentence. And you’ll still have to click on the regional links to make sure you aren’t missing something important enough to merit front-page play. At least, those links are more conveniently placed near the top of the home page.
Overall, it’s still a gamble whether you’ll find all the news you want.
For all the design changes, there’s still nothing particularly innovative here. The newest video seems to be over a week old. The data links at the bottom could be useful, but there isn’t much information available, as yet. Overall, it’s an improvement, because it’s easier to find some articles. But it seems as if a lot more could have been done.
In this, the BDN isn’t much different from the rest of the Maine dailies’ online editions.
Nearly every e-newspaper in the state is plagued by technical glitches, poor designs, lack of creativity and a stunning ignorance of the medium. If the print version of the news suffered from these same chronic afflictions, the daily paper would arrive with large holes cut in some pages, the sections all mixed together, and if you didn’t read it right away, many of the stories would disappear. The Journal Tribune, which has the worst Web site of any of the state’s papers, would be tossed on your porch with the pages stuck together so they couldn’t be opened.
Why is it so difficult for daily newspapers to design decent Web sites?
As one industry insider told me, “The problem with newspaper people running Web sites is they’re newspaper people. They don’t know what they want from the Web or how to get it.”
Send in the geeks.
Things changed a little too much: Former Blethen Maine Newspapers Washington correspondent Jonathan Kaplan has written an account of his June dismissal for the Washington Post’s Web site.
It’s an insightful look into his last days at the papers and the consequences of not having somebody keeping a close eye on the state’s congressional delegation.
I’d feel a lot worse about the loss of Kaplan’s reporting if the pieces he’d filed during his brief tenure at the Portland Press Herald, Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel were half as feisty as this one is.
Things don’t change at all: Anybody remember when Press Herald editor Jeannine Guttman wrote this?
“This year, we have a very aggressive election plan that includes live coverage from both national political conventions in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul.”
That was back in March, when the newspaper business didn’t look quite so grim.
Even though the Portland paper carried through on its promise to cover the Olympics (in some of the least memorable prose this side of a Department of Health and Human Services audit report), no Maine paper is staffing the conventions this year (although Maine Public Radio and PolitickerME.com both sent reporters). So far, the liveliest reporting has been done by bloggers, of whom there are a nice selection on Mike Tipping’s site, and other Web addresses.
Anybody remember when daily newspapers were important?
Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
Posted on Monday, August 25, 2008 in Permalink
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Reader Comments:
You can always click the pause button if you find that the BDN's top stories are scrolling too quickly.
The cutoff subheads are annoying, though.
The Press Herald has had plenty of web geeks working for them over the years. The problem isn't just that the newspaper people don't know the web, it's that they insist on running things their way and pushing the experienced web people out. You could staff a pretty solid online newspaper with the people who left -- or were pushed from -- MaineToday over the past decade.
Why, I thought the Press Herald's Olympic coverage was powerful! I just wish I could have written the headlines:
MAINER TOURS GREAT WALL OF CHINA
MAINER TRADES PINS IN BEIJING
MAINER VISITS FORBIDDEN CITY
Where's Munjoy, Al?
Munjoy told me he's on vacation. He'll be back soon.
Al Diamon
I'd feel worse about the loss of Jonathan Kaplan if his stories were feisty, too, but maybe the littleminds who run the paper took all the feistiness out of them. Don't see much feistiness in the paper, so a good guess is that feistiness (which you can read as, y'know, "interesting") isn't important there. Read the turgid crap that passes for the city editor's blog and you'll get an idea of what they think is good. You've got to give them credit, though: They manage to be both bland and bloviated; insipid and fatuous. I moved back to Maine around the same time the Blethens bought the paper. What did they do? Turn off the oxygen? It's like the paper is suffocating.
Tom Bell (Munjoy) is currently on a family vacation.
That joke of a paper sure seemed feisty last week when it took character assassination to a new level by running a front page story (gee, nothing else going on?) about a private school soccer coach who said he played in the Olympics, but really didn't. Oh, the humanity!
Front page? Please. Their fraud writer can't write a game story to save her life and was intensely disliked by the high school sports community before. Now she's despised. The PPH has no credibility left, feisty or not.
Such a decision was appalling and is further evidence just how clueless they are over there.
The story about the high school fraudster is exactly what they should be doing more of ... Thousands of athletes work hard all day for years to earn their way into the Olympics and this guy walks around stealing their glory and getting a plum prep-school job to boot? George O'Leary, eat your heart out.
That is exactly the type of reaction (OH MY GOD BUFFY, HOW DARE THEY! HAVE YOU SEEN THE KEYS TO MY VOLVO?) that proves it's been far, far too long since aggressive reporting was the norm in Portland. Root out the lies. Make people furious. That's what reporters do. Except in Maine, where neither editors nor the community can stand it ...
Just for the record, I'm pretty certain Tom Bell is not Munjoy. Although I'm not so sure about Robert Baldacci.
Cheers,
Diamon
(also not Munjoy)