Blog de Puree

I’ve been following the events within the last few months surrounding the sale of the Community Newspaper Company and its online properties within Townonline.com to Gatehouse Media.

I’m doubly interested because my career currently revolves around online media and content delivery, and because I used to work with Herald Media years ago, when it owned and operated TownOnline.com and BostonHerald.com.

While I do agree with Gatehouse’s move to create one newspaper staff, as done by larger, more national and globally visible papers, such as The New York Times. (Read this memo from Executive Editor Bill Keller to the NYTimes staff on Poynter Online.) But so far, I have been very disappointed to see the quality of TownOnline sites go downhill since the official separation from Herald Media, and from what I understand, the responsibility of producing the papers online shifting to the paper editors.

Before the demise of the dedicated TownOnline Internet staff, the homepage for the site and the home pages for all of the local papers had a unique layout, with a large feature photo and accompanying caption, small thumbnail photos that were all the same size and the layout was condusive to moving or rotating the week’s top stories throughout the top of the page, creating a pleasant user experience. As the reader scrolled down the page, news and columns were clearly marked as coming from different sections of the paper, such as sports or opinion. Additionally, the content management system and layout of the paper allowed staff to post breaking stories to the front page as they happened.

I am completely unimpressed after navigating through the Gatehouse-owned TownOnline newspaper sites. After visiting just five different CNC papers, I found: the layout of some home pages are broken up and have a lot of wasted space at the valuable top of the page; some of the sites don’t have photos at all, but look like a textual news index page; some of the pages have random sizes of thumbnail photos down the right side of the news column; random pages within the sites keep giving me pop-up login windows for some unknown reason (Either gate the papers or don’t); and some of the pages are completely blank.

Clearly, there are some evolutionary growing pains taking place as newspaper editors are acclimating to a combined Web/print atmosphere. I’ve worked with many of them and they are a dedicated, hard working group who care very much about the quality of the news they deliver. But I wonder if Gatehouse has provided any training, or if the extra workload involved with creating Web sites that was given to an already light staff is just too much. But slapping up news and photos isn’t exactly rocket science. Has Gatehouse thought about it’s current site architecture to allow easier delivery of standard photo sizes and textual information so the beleaguered staff can keep the pages from looking like amateur news Web sites?

As the weeks go by and the online representations of these papers continue to look like garbage–in my humble opinion–and fail to work, this can only drive away an online readership that the company desperately needs to succeed. With increased competition from hyper-local online communities who are able to deliver information within various forms of media quickly, Gatehouse could lose its audience. I hope the company realizes that with the speed of Today’s Internet, user patience is not a commodity it can leverage.

I am currently still visiting these sites, even though I am an enthusiastic RSS feed user, and I hope something changes soon because my patience as an online visitor to TownOnline.com is growing thin. I’m now more apt to get my community news from The Daily News whose site’s user interface still looks like it came from the era when newspapers first went online back in the early 90s. But at least it still functions properly.