Funny that two days after O’Neil made several noteworthy comments about Star publisher Mark Zieman’s fuzzy math regarding the readership and quality of the paper and the atrocious interactivity and design of its online presence, we see that kansascity.com has unveiled a new look. We can only assume that Mr. Zieman is a fan of SOTL (despite his seemingly archaic view of blogs as mere entertainment sites or second-class news sources in the informational caste system) and drew upon all the resources at his command to redesign the site in record time. Or this has been in the works for awhile and we just got lucky in the timing of our commentary.
Honestly, it took me a second to realize I was looking at the new-and-improved site, since it appears that the only signficant changes include moving the catergory tabs from the left side of the screen to the top and bumping up the text size slightly. Apparently they’ve also improved the “Join the discussion” reader comment feature by requiring site registration to participate in the forums, which we imagine is just an attempt to claim “The Star has X number of registered users online!” in future marketing materials.
We’re still going through some of the updates to see what other newness is afoot — you can read their pretty uninformative FAQ section here. From what we’ve seen so far, we can describe the revamped site by using that classic phrase, “lipstick on a pig.” It’s like changing one’s shirt while wearing week-old undergarments…it still sort of stinks underneath.
UPDATE: Just noticed that Bottomline had written a post about Zieman’s black, white and rose-colored glasses the other day, which bore the same ”lipstick on a pig” line that we used in this post. So a mea culpa to BLC for repeating that…as we’ve previously noted, ’tis not the first time such things have occurred. Such is the nature of blogging on similar topics — guess we should have stuck with the dirty laundry metaphor. Anyway, there are some good comments and interesting observations on the BLC post — check it out here.
I had to log in to make comments on THIS website, so that doesn’t make The Star that much more evil, does it?
I know that this “update” to the website has been a running joke for several years. Apparently, the site was supposed to be updated almost a year ago, but they couldn’t get it together. I guess they got kinda busy outsourcing local jobs to India.
I have thought that The Star’s website was a disaster for years, and considering that everything is moving onto the web, for The Star to take so long to make important usability changes to their website seems really stupid.
These new changes are a little better, but not great. Once you click off the pop-up ads, you’ll see the type throughout the site isn’t really separated into sections very well, so it still looks like one long string of copy and links from top to bottom – very hard on the eyes. My hope is that they aren’t done making changes.
It’s pretty obvious that they don’t understand “new media” and how to connect to online readers. My guess is that any changes to the website will be driven by these issues:
1. Making online advertisers happy
2. Saving money
3. Getting ahold of your email address so they can send you “special offers”
4. Making sure all video content is contained ONLY on their website and that no one accidentally discovers The Star’s content on an evil website like YouTube that might expand their audience.
5. Making stories sound more sensational than they really are so they can get more “click throughs”
If these things don’t work, they might get desperate enough to try making the website more user-friendly, giving people more useful content and serving the community with investigations and skeptical political journalism.
I wouldn’t bet on it though.
Excellent points — and all very true. The entire site is designed so they can generate statistics and build a database of users for target marketing. Hardly an improvement on getting news to readers.
I’ve spoken with some folks involved with Web design today, and they all agree that the Star’s site flunks the “usability” test something fierce. If you have to scroll down to near the bottom of the page to actually get the day’s news stories, your audience gets annoyed right off the bat.
And absolutely right on about the video — yet another way for the Star to sell advertising and cut corners on reporting. Taking a camera to events and simply recording the goings-on isn’t journalism…it’s tourism. In addition, one notices that the majority of video stories come from KSHB…so again, they’re not generating original content.
Thanks for the comments –
B
Your silly blog most certainly did NOT push the Star to design a site in two days.
http://sci.tumblr.com/post/62883842/as-the-same-as-it-may-be
[...] Sheesh, talk about taking things too seriously… Regular readers will recall that Benton made a joke yesterday about how coincidental it was that the Star’s web redesign was launched a mere two [...]