I have been idly following the back & forth going on between Google (and, to a lesser extent, other search engines) and the “newspaper” (read: journalism) industry. I saw this in an article this morning on Newsvine:
Yet some publishers don’t see Google as an ally. They contend Google’s prosperity depends partly on its search engine’s ability to show capsules of newspaper stories and photographs, without paying for the privilege.
Or they complain that the Web surfers who come to newspaper sites from Google’s search engine often just read one story and then leave.
“A lot of it is just `fly-by’ traffic,” said The Dallas Morning News Publisher James Moroney. “It not the kind of online relationship I am looking for. I want people who are going to come to our site multiple times a month.”
I think this skirts the main issue with these sites. They are, by and large, terribly unusable from the reader’s point of view.
Why would a reader become more than a “fly-by” reader when the overall experience of news discovery is handled more effectively on another site’s application?
Generally, the “framing” of an article on most news web sites is cluttered. This clutter & poor information architecture cause users to have a hard time answering some of the most important navigation questions that a they can pose:
- Where am I?
- Where have I been?
- Where can I go?
The recklessness with which these sites throw their framing together causes people to then default to these answers:
- Some nows site.
- Google News
- “I can hit the back button.”
Newspapers cease to think that they can convert “fly-by” readers to long-time readers without a drastic change in the expectations they hold for their own websites.
