By Tracy Dingmann
My piece on the Journal’s pay wall a few weeks ago prompted such great comments and tips, I felt compelled to follow up with a post examining the Journal’s website in general.
Because it’s not just the pay wall that frustrates would-be readers of ABQJournal.com.
Readers criticize the site’s cluttered design and say they can never find what they seek. They say ABQJournal.com is difficult and confusing to navigate and complain that the search engine is not much help. They also hit ABQJournal.com for its lack of interactivity. Have any of you tried to post a comment on a story? Have you ever read one?
So I dug around a bit to try to find out why ABQJournal.com looks like it does, and why it seems the paper is not interested in improving it.
Several themes emerged, all tied to one premise/problem: The Albuquerque Journal is not in the news business – it’s in the newspaper business.
What does that mean? It means that, to management, ABQJournal.com is a very low priority. The prevailing opinion at the top is that the website is not important and not worth devoting significant resources to because it doesn’t draw the amount of readers that the print edition does. And there’s not much interest in revamping the entire publishing company to accommodate the online revolution.
Another huge reason that management thinks it’s okay to marginalize ABQJournal.com is the fact that ads on the site pull in a small fraction of the amount that ads in the print edition do. The undervaluing of online ads has always been a problem for websites. But it’s especially vexing for sites run by newspaper companies, who are used to pulling in big money for print ads.
These two factors go a long way toward explaining why the Journal considers ABQJournal.com an expendable proposition. And, I believe these factors are ultimately responsible for all of the other problems with the site.
Disinterest and denial about how drastically the communication industry has changed is why top editors at the Journal don’t care about revamping ABQJournal.com’s confusing, antiquated design.
It’s why, for years, they have kept piling design element on top of design element, instead of taking the time and money to think out a new streamlined layout on a platform that wasn’t created in the 90’s.
It’s why ABQJournal.com is set up to make it difficult for readers to comment on stories – because the legal and practical hassle of moderating comments from readers is a challenge and expense they don’t want to make.
To be fair, the Journal is not the only paper that has resisted adapting its news delivery model to today’s changing media landscape. In fact, it’s very hard to find a newspaper that hasn’t.
But in my opinion, refusing to improve your website and bring it up to date because you want people to go back to buying your paper again is just short of tragic.
abqjournalwatch.wordpress.com 