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TimesPicayune.com
Pssst, Times Picayune: It's almost 2008. Do you know where your Web site is? |
Stupid behavior by newspapers continues when it comes to interactive media. You'd think by now they'd at least
start to get it.
A couple of days ago, I couldn't remember the URL for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. I was pretty sure it was Nola.com. (It is, sort of.) Instead, I tried an experiment. I typed TimesPicayune.com into my browser's location bar. Heck, it's a distinctive enough name (not "journal.com" or something similarly nondescript) that I figured it ought to work.
It ought to -- but it doesn't.
In fact, TimesPicayune.com takes you to the most appallingly circa-1995 Web site I have seen in years. It includes the paper's logo, lots of e-mail addresses, lots of customer service links, and more -- but it doesn't take you to the news. Or to the newspaper. Or to the paper's site.
It does include a link, Read Today's News, that's in blue type and that doesn't stand out -- so my eyes passed right over it. Three times. It's there; maybe I need new glasses. But what about a live link, perhaps? Or a few headlines? Or something other than a blue-type, sort-of-invisible link on the second-most-boring Web page on the planet?
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Even that "Read Today's News" link doesn't take me to the (parent) company's primary Web site in New Orleans,
Nola.com. Instead, it takes me to another butt-ugly site,
Nola.com/t-p, the paper's "own" site.
Now, I know that Nola.com is actually run by Advance Internet, a corporate cousin of The Times-Picayune and Advance Publishing, its owner in the Newhouse family. I also know that -- as at many papers where the Web site is operated independently -- there are all sorts of corporate guidelines governing cross-linking. competition, and cooperation between sites, etc. (Advance Internet notes: "Nola.com is affiliated with The Times-Picayune." Apparently, just barely.)
Isn't this just plain silliness? Or, in fact, extreme stupidity?
