Erdos Had The Number First

Kirkville - Why Haven’t Online Newspapers Gotten it Right?

I think he’s got one big point, the rest of the article being just sort-of folk-remedy right.

And that last point is the one that makes online newspapers pale copies of their paper originals. Leafing through a paper newspaper, one sees headlines on each page, and may end up reading stories that would not be likely to show up when customizing a web site by subject and keyword. Instead of receiving a “customized” version of the news, you get all the news that’s fit to print (to coin a phrase). In this time of fragmentation, people tend to seek out media sources that fit their point of view, whereas a paper newspaper, by its very nature as a source of news for all readers, has to include as many viewpoints as possible. Nowhere is this more obvious than on the editorial pages of any paper.

This is, at it’s core, a usability issue. Now, I don’t normally agree with the Usability People but sometimes I do. This is one of those sometimes. The fact that people have well-developed strategies for reading a lot of information that are not effective online is a problem that online media outlets don’t seem to care about.

They should. And until they do, there will be a lot of failed web-sites that could have been successful.