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

[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.