QOD — Weigh In On the New Delawareonline Interface
Thanks to Steve Newton here, we have a new Question of the Day:
Does anybody else hate the new even-less-functional-than-before Delaware Online interface as badly as I do?
If you haven’t seen the new web interface, you can see it here — Delawareonline.com
Weigh in in the comments!
Tags: QOD, The News Journal
I guess they are trying for this tablet-ized interface, but it just seems clunky and badly organized. Besides — it took me yesterday and today (and a clearing of cache and cookies) to even get the new site.
Thumbs down.
Ah, so that’s what’s going on. I couldn’t get on it yesterday (Gateway error?), haven’t tried today… Looks like I can live without the NJ. 😉
I’ve got the same problem. Repeated Gateway errors.
Looks like they’re trying to push us back to the dead tree edition.
Okay, cleared the cache and cookies… Oh my, no likey. What’s with all the photo blocks?
What a kludge.
I checked a couple of other Gannett papers in my bookmarks and Gannett hasn’t rolled it out there yet. Maybe this is a test. If it is, let us hope it fails.
If you take a look at USA Today, it looks like the interface is here to stay. Then there’s this (spot the problem):
On second look, it seems to be a front end for moving what little substance the NJ still has behind a paywall (“E-Newspaper” link, top left, subscription required), bringing to life the phrase, “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.”
All they need to do is just have a list of every story that’s in that day’s paper. No one really needs any of the fancy stuff. They are supposed to be delivering “news” not winning a beauty contest.
But I am glad that they got rid of the drop down ads that would make you have to chase the story you wanted to click on.
And also that I have a choice as to whether I want to watch the video or not. Every time I clicked on a story and had to hit pause every time the 5 cent ad from Concord Mall came on was killing me.
People still go to Delawareonline?
Horrible….but what else would you expect? A step backwards for the august institution? Surprise, surprise.
It is terrible. I can’t figure out how to get around the site and it is way, way too busy. Just give us the news and take your artistic bent somewhere else.
It’s ain’t artistry. It’s Gannett.
Dumbing down is what they do. They are the lowest common denominator of news holding companies.
Back when I was on the road all the time, when I stayed in a hotel that thought USA Today was a suitable newspaper to leave outside my room, my first question to the desk clerk was, “Where can I get a real newspaper?”
A nugget: Part of Gannett’s agreement with some hotel chains was that there could be no vending boxes for real newspapers on the property.
“Then there’s this (spot the problem):”
Are you talking about the misspelling of the word “ruling”? If that’s the only spelling error in one day, we should consider ourselves lucky. Gannett has cut its local staffs to the bone. It’s no wonder that spelling, grammatical and style errors are there all the time.
Wilmington seems to be a testing ground for Gannett. The News Journal was one of the first to go behind a paywall, one of the first to change to Facebook commenting, and one of the first to copy the USA Today template. Why can’t they look at philly.com? Easy to navigate, lists of stories, no clunky huge photos. Even if they kept it paywall-protected, it would be a monumental improvement. Since the rollout, I’ve found myself spending less and less time on the site.
Frank, you may be conflating Gannett with McClatchy. The larger point is still correct however.
Not being a tablet user I didn’t pay too much attention to all the pretty things and just clicked on e-newspaper. Which hasn’t changed. Oh, I get a free subscription because I take the Sunday paper delivery to get the TV listing magazine and the coupons. That gives me access to the daily paper on-line. It isn’t free but it is a fair value for me.
Yeah, this about seals it for the News Journal. Which is a shame, because a good newspaper can truly be a public service. And they have some good reporters trying to do good work there. Trying.
Perhaps this could help smaller papers like the Delaware State News; a paper that sometimes does some decent stories about stuff rarely mentioned in TNJ. Also, I will be making a donation to WDDE/First State Media today. They actually report what’s going on in leg hall during the session. You wouldn’t even know our legislators were in session from TNJ.
Also, I thought the typo in the photo Cassandra posted was that Virginia celebrates same “sex-marriages.” What’s a sex-marriage? Seems like something the right-wingers would try to abolish immediately.
Dan, I don’t think I’m confused. The McClatchy papers I read online are far superior to anything Gannett.
The San Jose Mercury News and the Sacramento Bee have some excellent writers, and McClatchyDC has great commentary. Of course, this could be a legacy of Knight -Ridder, which was forced into liquidation because a major stockholder thought the profit margin wasn’t high enough, and we all know that the true measure of an enterprise is not that it provides a good product at a reasonable rate of return, but rather how many private jets the hedge fund manager can buy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McClatchy_Company
Well put Frank. Everyone needs to continue makingt those points, or it may be 100 years until The shareholder value myth is put to rest.