Here Comes the Pun

I know, snark doesn’t solve anything, but this proves just how awful the Providence Journal botched the relaunch of their site. And by “botched” I mean “did a half-assed job and blatantly rushed it to release before it was done.”

One last Projo post tonight: since they’ve left so much white space on their newly-redesigned site, their occasional pull-down ad until leaves absolutely no news content above the fold. You have to manually close the ad unit, or scroll down.

This screenshot came from The Chowderhead, who sent me this so I didn’t have to visit the site myself today… although honestly, he was one of five people who sent me a similar screenshot in frustration with how badly the site was redesigned.

You can’t do anything but shake your head at any of the old fogies who decided that this was a well-executed redesign.

This is not how you launch a new site.

You launch site when it’s done. Not when it’s “close enough” and still missing a few features. Not when it’s “not perfect.” YOU LAUNCH IT WHEN IT IS DONE.

The comment above that one, by the way, is a misguided attempt by a ProJo staffer to give me the address to their RSS feed, which disappeared from the site when they relaunched. That’s obviously not an RSS feed, nor does the link provided actually have one.

This is awful. Just God awful.

This is the man that the Providence Journal put in charge of the redesign of their website and the development of their paywall.

That’s right, an old-school print journalism guy who’s been in the same news organization for 26 years. Look, I don’t mean to suggest that people who have been in the industry this long can’t adapt to new technology, but it explains the talking-down in his response to me.

The top three men in charge at the Journal - Publisher Howard Sutton, Executive Editor Thomas Heslin, and Phipps - have worked there FOR A COMBINED 84 YEARS.

Over the last half-decade, these three men watched over a drop in print circulation of nearly 50%, a drop in advertising revenue of over 50%, two multi-day outages of their web site, a site design that was static for that entire period until yesterday, an increase in subscription price that sped the decline in circulation, and a handful of changes to the newspaper itself that have done nothing to stop the bleeding.

That kind of seniority breeds incompetence, unwillingness to change, inability to accept internal criticism, and a clear lack of dedication to the remaining readership, who upon asking serious questions of their new online product’s viability, are met with curt responses. It doesn’t breed new ideas or innovative thinking.

This makes so much more sense. It certainly explains the management’s inability to recognize that many people don’t want to read a newspaper online in a newspaper-like format. It definitely explains their selection of a small design firm in Providence with no experience in news media participating in the redesign. It explains the type of person who might think replacing a 5-character domain name with a 17-character domain name is a good idea. It explains why they’re so selfishly adamant about protecting their print content as print and nothing else. And it undoubtedly explains why I should be more despondent for the future of this heritage newspaper I grew up reading.

I know I’m beating a dead horse, but I swear, this web site is an embarrassment to the newspaper.