Thumbs up for Fairfax
The NewsBreak service is a genuine clearinghouse — it not only links to Fairfax’s own news sites, but also to The Australian and the ABC. Fairfax obviously understands that people want free access to information, and they’ll choose the service that makes it easier to find. NewsBreak is not (yet?) as comprehensive as Google News, but it’s certainly better organised. Now, if only Fairfax would unlock the content at the Fin Review, and ditch the painful new dropdown menus at The Age, they’d get two thumbs up from me.
The other thing that would be nice would be RSS feeds (or similar).
Hi Rob,
Glad you like Newsbreak - it’s been around for a year or so now, and the longer it runs the better the algorithms driving it get. The idea behind it was twofold - one, users want to be able to get all of the information in one place, and two,, we wanted to be able to show the relative importance of news stories by ranking them not just on our editorial treatment / importance, but also on how the rest of the Australian (and to some extent international) media were treating stories. It also allows (like Google News) a greater depth of insight into news stories, which is really useful if you like to dig deep.
Bad news for you on the AFR content though, I can’t see that being unlocked (or more than a couple of articles per day) any time in the near future.
Sorry to hear you don’t like the new menus. I was responsible for the old extended left-hand side menu structure, and for the change-over to this new placement. For power site / internet users like us, it’s possibly a slight retrograde step, but for most of our users, it works better. The strongest pattern by far is homepage - article then back to the homepage. The new layout allows us to get a lot more content onto the homepage, and higher up on the page as well, which makes it more visible and faster for most people. It’s always a frustrating challenge redesigning a major site like the age (and the smh - new look about to launch), because there simply isn’t a single model that suits something like 4 million different users - you (hopefully) end up with the model that works best for the greatest number of people and annoys the smallest number.
Oh, and Nick, we do have RSS feeds. Simply go to http://theage.com.au/rsschannels/ for the age, or
http://smh.com.au/rsschannels/ for the herald.
At the moment it only gives you the headlines, but hopefully over time those of us who believe in an open internet will be able to convince the powers that including a little bit of relevant text in the RSS feed won’t equate to giving away the farm.
Thanks for the feedback - keep it coming.
stilt
Stilt, thanks for stopping by to explain.
I’ll probably get used to the new menus, so I guess that’s not a big deal. I should have mentioned my biggest beef with the new design: splitting articles into little bits so I have to click two or three times to read a story. Perhaps a “1 | 2 | 3 | Full text” system would be better?
The AFR thing is an unrealistic dream of mine. I read the hard copy at work, and there’s often things in it I’d like to blog about, but (1) it’s a hassle to type out quotations, and (2) I don’t like writing “no link available”. (I have the same criticism of The West Australian.) I honestly think it would boost circulation if the content was available online — the reporting is generally pretty good, and there are articles you don’t find anywhere else. If people could get a taste for that online, they’d buy the paper. Even if you did it on a delayed basis: yesterday’s articles are available free, but you’ve got to subscribe to get up-to-the-minute news. I dunno.
I hear you Rob. The pagination I can’t claim credit for. Personally I think it’s annoying, but of course it does allow for the sale of 2 or 3 times as many ads as a single page. It has certainly been the source of the greatest number of negative comments about the new layout, with perhaps the exception of people complaining that “odd spot” isn’t on the front page any more. It’s too early to tell if annoys people enough that they choose to go elsewhere, or if any drop is offset by the increased number of ads served.
The folks at the AFR are funny - they still fear the web and believe it will canabilise sales. I don’t doubt for a second that puting the content online (perhaps delayed as you suggested) would boost traffic to the site immensly, but also generate more interest in the print version. Alas such decisions are not mine to make.