Blog de Puree

We’ve canceled our print subscription to the Newburyport Daily News, and we did it for a couple of reasons.

• The price, hovering over $200, was not worth the amount of news and information that we actually read and felt was worthwhile.
• It was also a waste of paper. Better to read online than destroy the environment.
• I can use the RSS feeds to get only the sections I want.

Now we subscribe via the paper’s RSS feed. It’s free and I can see the news that interests me every day. Unfortunately, the paper needs A LOT of work to bring its site into the 21st century, because wow, is it lagging. Here’s a few quick fixes that the Eagle Tribune company, the parent company of the Newburyport Daily News, could do to bring it’s site up to date.

• Fix some of the links in the RSS feeds. Don’t include articles that will be blocked through registration. That’s annoying and unprofessional.
• The RSS feeds include the same stories for days on end and clogs RSS aggregators. Just include the new stuff each day.
• Don’t gate or require registration for online content at all. For a small, regional paper, how much profit do they really think this is going to make?
• The site would be better served by opening all of its content and making more ad revenue off of page impressions and through other ad strategies.
• The calendar is gated? Totally bogus! The amount of traffic the paper could derive from that alone could be huge. Especially if it is properly marketed.
• The page is buried with ads. I don’t know where actual content ends, begins or if it’s even there sometimes. Pick a few spots on the page to place ads and leave it at that. (This will also help with page design.)

But the Eagle Tribune’s sites have made some improvements, so to be fair, I’ve included those.

• The rotating photo block on the home page, which links to related stories is a nice visual touch. I’d love to see more photos throughout the site.
• A new baseball blogger, Rob Bradford, is doing a great job and it’s refreshing that he’s actually posting on a regular basis. Nothing is worse than a blogger that posts once a week or less.
• The design of the site has been tweaked. It’s definitely an improvement, but it’s still rather old school and a bit painful to stare at.

The Eagle Tribune company must also be given credit for having working RSS feeds, whereas the Townonline sites and the Amesbury News still don’t. I bemoaned many of the Townonline weakness back in December of 2006 after the Community Newspaper Company was bought by Gatehouse Media, Inc. and they still don’t have a working RSS feed. And if it does exist, it sure as heck isn’t easy to find.