Globe/Boston.com needs our help! ;-)

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

[This is OT DS so I will certainly understand if the mods toss it]

I read the Boston Globe on-line at boston.com. I read it mostly to glean any local news I may have missed from other sources, not because it is central or in any way important. I feel somewhat bad about this. I grew up with home delivery of the Globe and while maybe I was less critical as a callow youth... (hell no, I was fearsome) it does seem like these days it is barely on the boil.

The point? Ah yes, the point. Is there anything we can do? Does anyone have a line in? I don't presume we can affect editorial policy. That is laden in god knows what layers of political ya-ya and office wah-wah. Maybe there is something we can do about Boston.com? It is so much of a "web site by interns" (not to disparage interns...;-) in it's overall design, stories, social media attempts, layout. It is just a disaster but it continues on year after year. Does anyone read it besides me and the trolls who post in the comments section? I lived in Chicago a long time and coming back here I am kind of ashamed to cite the Globe/Boston.com as my hometown paper.

Anyway - is there someone to tell? I've been over the site and have posted a few suggestions but it is all yadda-yadda replies. I was thinking that if there was a lever (i.e. a response here) maybe someone in some boardroom on Morrissey Boulevard might take a clue - and forestall the movers coming in.

Comments

[ron_newman]

Can you be more specific about what you want the Globe or Boston.com to do differently? They did add a local Somerville site -- http://www.Boston.com/Somerville -- last year, and said this was partly a response to our discontent with the dropping of City Weekly.

The person in charge of that site (and other local sites) is David Dahl, Dahl@globe.com .

Being more specific

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

I realize this is lame and futile...but when has that ever stopped anyone from post on the internets...

This is a 5 minute effort: 30 second eval of the Boston.com front page, 4.5 minute Photoshop hack-up. So, so much more could be said. My question: isn't there anyone in the Globe/Boston.com entity looking at this sort of thing?

Re: Being more specific

[m00n.livejournal.com]

Almost all of these are things I've personally thought while reading their crappy page. Probably the easiest thing they could do with minimum effort is make it look exactly like their parent company (The Times') web site. It wouldn't be terribly unique, but then, neither is the print newspaper.

Re: Being more specific

[teele-sq.livejournal.com]

i agree with you

Re: Being more specific

[ron_newman]

If I want a more serious Boston-focused news site, I usually go past the Boston.com front page, over to http://Boston.com/globe . The disadvantage is that this is basically a reproduction of the morning's print edition and not continually updated during the day.

Re: Being more specific

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

But that is still filled with a huge amount of visual junk (duplicate search, section adverts that take up more space than warranted, on and on. Take a critical look at it to see what I mean). It is just really bad design. As the post above said - why don't they just rip off the NYTimes site design - or at least take a lesson from it.

Anyway... don't want to pollute up DS with OT any more than I have. I do think it is good that they have the various city pages and attempt to cover local events. My point only is that the Globe/Boston.com effort is so feeble and barely keeping up - technically but also conceptually. The bad design is also indicative of a failure of any vision for a new media type news enterprise. They duct tape in 'twitter' feeds, have some scant provision for 'comments' but they really don't get the whole 'social media' thing at all. It all seems really dead and like no one is paying attention.

Ok...that's my riff...

Re: Being more specific

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Also, it seems like every article they have up there that I want to read, they present as the same weird slideshow they've used for 10 years. I don't need to save bandwidth anymore, do you know what I mean?

Re: Being more specific

[ron_newman]

Oh, those are so annoying! I wish they had a "Display all on one page" option, or at least one to show 5 or 10 items at a time.

Re: Being more specific

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Yes, you'd think they would, since as far as I can tell those pages don't even have ads that load. Their ad system sucks too.

The Big Picture

[cthulhia]

is one of the items from Boston.com that is relinked and mentioned globally.

I typically get pointered to it from non-locals. It may be one of Boston.com's best features, and should probably appear higher in the layout.

Certainly not a "huh?"

Re: Being more specific

[bobobb.livejournal.com]

Wow, I have always thought the same thing! From having worked on a few websites before I could guess that at editorial meetings, someone says "we need XXX on the homepage, can we add that?" without any thought to good design or organization. And then it keeps happening and happening and happening and then....you end up with Boston.com.

The sad part is that this was the redesign!

[overstim.livejournal.com]

dont you think this would be more appropriate for the Boston community?
anyway... a web site will be as good as it can afford to be. apply for a job in the globe's marketing department and drum up some ad sales!

[ron_newman]

It's fine here, but let's focus on how the Globe can better cover our immediate local area - Somerville and Cambridge and neighboring towns. I'd start by asking the Globe to create a Cambridge local web page similar to the existing Somerville one.

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

It is not a revenue problem, it's a "vision thing" problem (as the somewhat less reviled Bush used to say). In other words, it is more of a "build it and they will come" problem. The Globe has a design and some sort of vision - it all is just really, really wrong.

[cnoocy]

(Note: While I have worked there, it was 6 years ago. My info may be out of date.)
Boston.com is a separate company from the Globe. And they are in continual danger of having NYT's top management decide that their existence isn't worth the hassle and close them down to be replaced by a feed of the print news. No more local coverage, no more breaking news, just what was in the paper that morning. So the Boston.com management is focused on getting lots of hits, and monetizing those hits through ads. The "fluff" you point out probably gets a lot of hits, which helps sell ads, and makes Boston.com look better on the NYT balance sheet at the end of the quarter.
And they're doing something right, because Boston.com is a phenomenally popular site in the Boston "market".
They're relatively friendly folks, so you can probably just give them a call if you want to talk about this with someone there. And they're hiring.

[cold-type.livejournal.com]

If you want to see what's in the Boston Globe, it's probably easier to click on "Today's Globe" or bookmark: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/?p1=GN_TodaysGlobe
You could also subscribe to GlobeReader and download the entire paper.

David Beard is editor of Boston.com. You could e-mail him your thoughts at beard@globe.com

Interestingly, a Globe story last April noted that the Boston Globe is the 14th largest newspaper, but has the sixth most visited web site.
http://www.boston.com/ae/media/articles/2009/04/12/what_went_wrong/

[georgy.livejournal.com]

I worked at Boston.com (as a staffer and, yes, as an intern) for nearly four years, though I've been out of there for five-plus years. My thoughts:

- If you don't like the fluff, don't click on it. Fluff brings ad impressions, which brings revenue. Have you been paying attention to the news? Boston.com is run by the Globe, which is a newspaper, which has no money. Turning one story about Justin Timberlake winning a Hasty Pudding pot into a 32-page career retrospective is significantly more lucrative. Vote with your feet -- or in this case, your mouse.
- Boston.com's longtime problem is that it is trying to be all things -- a news site tied to the Boston Globe, but also a cultural portal. It is hard to be both and do justice to what both types of sites need.
- Yes, the b.com homepage has significantly more typos and mistakes and poorly formatted images than a homepage of its stature should. Every time you see a mistake, send a feedback message. They do get read. If it is during business hours, errors may be corrected in short order.
- Like them or not, B.com has been doing custom logos probably as long as Google's been doing doodles.

You can write feedback or contact some of the folks named here to share your thoughts, but to a certain degree, B.com is what it is, and you're going to have to take it or leave it.

Do you know any of the company context? The Globe just brought on a new publisher, who has given Globe editor Marty Baron say-so over the company's digital strategies (read: Boston.com). (Read more (http://thephoenix.com/Boston/news/96346-brave-new-globe/)) So perhaps changes will be in the works over time, who knows?

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

I'm going to weigh in on this because I agree with everything the OP said.

I LOVE the NYT webpage. I spend rather a lot of my miniscule amount of free time on it. If I want to read an article in whole and then see a multimedia presentation about it, I can do that. If I want to go directly to a whole section and read its articles one by one, I can do that. It's been redesigned at least once if not twice in the last 5 years.

Boston.com looks like a joke, and is still using the same presentation techniques as they were when monitors were smaller and bandwidth was tighter. For all I know they still use pop-under ads.

I would absolutely love it if the same design were applied to both properties owned by the same people. I hope that's not terribly offensive to say, but the bottom line is that I do not go to boston.com for any actual boston related news, because it is never presented in any efficient manner. They can't even present timely election results--and those are hyper-local things to want to present.

[cnoocy]

To be honest, if you have a minuscule amount of free time, you're not Boston.com's target audience. Boston.com is aimed at moderately to extremely bored office workers who are looking for some local-based but not explicitly recreational web content. That audience provides staggering amounts of page hits, and a lot of the design elements that you may find annoying do a good job at getting them to click. That may sound mercenary, but as I stated above, Boston.com is in the position of having to justify its existence to a non-local board of directors.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Yah, no huge amount of free time, not a lot of interest in local celebrities or non-local ones in town, lots of sites blocked at work...Oh well. But the site is still embarassingly ugly and inefficient. Like still having an aol.com email address.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

They do still use pop-unders, and it drives me nuts (particularly on the slideshows, where you can get one for every single page...and it takes so long to go through all the pages I seldom bother even if I was interested in the content...)

I can't figure out why Firefox isn't blocking the pop-unders, honestly.

[ron_newman]

The link at bottom left that you marked 'Huh?' is actually one of Boston.com's most well-regarded features, a high-resolution photo essay called The Big Picture. It reminds me of the old LIFE Magazine, and really should get its own domain.

This is one of Boston.com's strengths that they should play up more. Boston.com front page doesn't do it justice at all.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I'd never clicked on it before - you're right, it's lovely.

yeah

[cthulhia]

what ron said.

[ifotismeni]

site redesigns take tons of hours of manpower and huge budgets. even just implementing NYT's template and porting boston.com data would be, i imagine, months and months of effort.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

A) They are in the midst of a redesign and a new web model is being rolled out sometime over the next couple of months.

B) The TimesCo doesn't care about the Globe and has been keeping them on short funding, unlike the TribCo with the Trib.

B') My theory, which I have aired here on occasion, is that the TimesCo wants the Globe to fail so they can replace it with a New York Times Boston Edition.

[ron_newman]

Is (B) still true? The Globe is no longer for sale.

[anyee.livejournal.com]

The worst part of the boston.com website is sitelife.boston.com. Specifically, this is part of the comment system that reliably hangs after posting a comment. All the little cookie servers also tend to lag out. I can't tell you how many times I've put in a comment, waited, and then watched the page time out like a shitty Geocities (RIP) page.

The moderation on the comments is also remarkably mediocre. These are some of the most racist and disgusting pages this side of /b/. I exaggerate slightly.

[tooffdk.livejournal.com]

If you think those are bad, you should see the comments over at Bostonherald.com...

Thanks

[serious-noir.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the comments - I learned a few things (had never looked at that "Big Picture" feature before. It's cool and should get more play).

I was going to go into more specifics/details of a Boston.com site critique but I am sleepy and after the initial posting impulse, it does seem rather pointless to rant on here. Someone posted that the boston.com site is in the midst of a redesign. Hopefully they will address the glaring design/functional issues and even go further to try something new.

The Boston market/audience afaik is wide open - there isn't a dominant site. Boston.com may be getting the hits but only because there is nothing better - *not* because they are doing anything well. I am on the design/tech end of things so I don't claim to know how to make a site pay (though yes, I have my opinions) but something more limber, fluid, well designed, with a clue as to "web 2.0" (and maybe 2.1) and bottom line, well written (!). That would make the difference.

Re: Thanks

[spettacolo.livejournal.com]

You may try emailing Alan Taylor, then guy who created and edits "The Big Picture" feature. I've seen him commenting on things around the web and he seems like a nice fellow. I'm not sure what kind of pull he has, but it's something. His personal web site is here: http://www.kokogiak.com/