Reading your daily paper
Now, I'm not one to complain. Well, I am, as is anyone who starts a sentence like that, but I try and eschew the negative view on this weblog. But I'd just like to draw your attention to two different approaches to the same task that may, or may not, illustrate what is a good practice and what is just a bad idea.
There are two broadsheet newspapers available here in sunny Sydney, NSW. The Fairfax group publishes the Sydney Morning Herald (sister paper to Melbourne's The Age) and News Corporation publishes the Australian (the only national newspaper in this country). The compete fairly vigourously in the market place and although their political slants are slightly different they are targeted at similar audiences. What is not in contention is that both are fine newspapers and fulfil the role of delivering the daily news with considered comment very well.
What I would like to share with you is their approach to publishing content on the internet. The Sydney Morning Herald has smh.com.au, a virtual carbon copy of the paper available to read on the internet. If you go to a newsagent and buy the paper, then open up your web browser and point it to smh.com.au you will read the same stories, in the same format. They also link to syndicated content from their partners on special interest sites like rugby heaven, where you can read more specialised stories that probably aren't of interest to most of the Herald's readers. In essence it is a great web site and unscientific straw poll of my office shows that at least sixty percent of the people here read one or more articles from it each day.
The Australian meanwhile, is a whole different kettle of fish. News Corporation got the web bug in 1999 and spun off News Interactive, which was tasked with milking money out of this technology business. Today their horizons have been lowered quite a way but their portal still remains. news.com.au was designed to be the one stop shop for Australian web surfers. I won't get into the pros and cons of web portals here, other than to note that the prevailing current opinion is that they are not a good thing. Suffice it to say News Interactive has rather toned down the one site fits all concept they originally launched and now actually has a separate URL for each of their papers, the Australian can be found at http://theaustralian.news.com.au/ Go and have a look, I'll still be here when you get back.
Go on, compare and contrast.
So what do you think? My straw poll found no takers for the Australian web site. It is too busy, the content isn't easily accessible and it only renders properly in Internet Explorer (for expletives sake). News flash - it doesn't bugger up Mozilla too badly these days, I hadn't bothered to check for so long, but in the interests of fair reporting I thought I would try today.
But my point, and I do have one, is that the major reason most people I know would look at the Australian is that Tuesday is I.T day. On Tuesday the Australian publishes an IT supplement which is about the only print summary of developments in the business down under. When I first came to Oz in 1996 it was the only place to go for job adverts, industry news and views and general gossip. Go back to theaustralian.news.com.au, where are the IT articles? They are not there. Scroll down the page and you will find a section entitled 'FROM AUSTRALIAN IT'. No hyper link, but if you search carefully enough you will find yourself at http://australianit.news.com.au/ - a completely different web site. On my screen, this presents a list of precisely three readable articles and the rest of the page is taken up with complete junk. Navigation is via a java applet - oh dear.
These two sites represent two conflicting views of the web. In my opinion the Sydney Morning Herald gets it. Although their site doesn't have a search feature and access to archive copies is restrictive (and they want to charge you for some content), the design of the site is clean, simple and easy to navigate. The Australian is the result of a web designer gone mad. Its full of flashy user interface tricks that add nothing to the actual content - why do we need four columns of fixed width, for instance - and actually reading the news is a little tricky. When I click on the 'sports' entry in the navigation bar on the left of the main page I get three, count 'em, stories in the first pane. You then have to scroll down to a list of headlines which may be of interest to you. Go to the Herald front page and click on Sports News and you get twenty one main stories with pointers to at least another ten background and syndicated stories.
Still, its your choice which you want to read. I will, as ever, vote with my feet and carry on reading the Herald every day. I'll leave the masochists to fight with the results of the usability gurus at News Interactive.
1:53:17 PM 
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