Editor & Publisher living in the stone age?
A blogger named PaulineyM posted an amusing piece about Editor & Publisher magazine and its web site. Editor & Publisher is one of my favorite sources of news about the newspaper business.
Apparently, PaulineM was the web master there for the past nine months. She was recently laid off by E&P’s parent company, Nielsen. At the same time, E&P is starting a column aimed at young journalists — a column to feature “blog-like comments.”
But the E&P web site has a little problem. It won’t work with current technology, PaulineyM writes:
My job was to make sure the site looked as 21st century as possible. From day one I complained about the CMS, which made users type in HTML code manually and couldn’t handle embedded code for video. In short, it was very 1998. I complained to anyone who would listen that if they didn’t upgrade their system, readers were going to go elsewhere, since web users expect a certain benchmark of basic features on a site.
There’s a lesson in all this. Traffic at E&P isn’t going down because the newspaper industry is in a bind. Traffic is going down because their web site lives in a time warp, and someone in the pipeline is too cheap to redesign and upgrade it. Anyone with half a brain knows that the web is not some “special project” to hand over to an intern or maybe some of the less bright members on staff. It’s the first impression people have of your brand, and you should invest all you can in it.
Not surprising. Many of you aren’t old enough to remember the history of Editor & Publisher’s print edition. I subscribed at home for a number of years in the mid-to-late 1980s. It was badly designed — extraordinarily so — and featured a huge front-page ad in lieu of a centerpiece. I don’t know when they upgraded their dead tree edition, but it was long after I had given up on it.
Here’s the brief at Gawker that prompted PaulineyM’s broadshot. Here’s the original announcement about the new E&P column.