Thursday, April 27, 2006

revolution!

I going to start a grassroots Internet movement. Wanna join me?

The issue at hand:

Knight Ridder's websites suck.

And I've come to believe that their sucky-ness poses a serious threat to our democracy.

It's like this: Knight-Ridder is like the biggest daily newspaper chain in the country. Say what you will about them, how they've cut back on news operations, and they're the death of the Fourth Estate, or whatever. But the fact is they're still huge, they're still stacked with tons of hard-working journalists, and if they fail to transition into the 21st Century, and they go down, we're all in big trouble.

The Kay Barneses and Matt Blunts of the world will be free to breed and dominate in complete darkness!

And recent news suggests that they're not only going down, but that they've sunk, what with their sale to old man McClatchy. So perhaps my urge for an online revolution is at once too late and premature.

But the immediate threat remains. The websites for one of the biggest news organizations in the world suck, and our very freedom is in danger.

So I ask you, Are you with me?

Is it possible to start with one little post read by a few dozen people and ultimately force a mega-corporation to face the media future and give us websites we can use and depend on?

I'll go more into specific reasons why the websites suck later (as if you need me to tell you). And we can talk later about strategy.

For now I just want to know if there are any willing comrades out there.

Are there?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Uh, sorry, no.

George H. Williams said...

I agree 100%, Joe.

Anonymous said...

funny you should mention this. i'm 'on the schedule' to hang out with the kcstar local webfolk and play with some CSS to prettypretty it.

so what do you hate most?

Anonymous said...

Some of the things I hate:

- registration - and the mandatory receipt of spam that follows
- all those ads that keep covering up the articles
- photos and graphs that are too tiny to make out
- just about impossible to find any minor categories (such as "events calendar" from the main page
- ugly and cluttered
- search engine doesn't work well when searching with multiple keywords. Is it an 'and', and 'or', or a 'phrase'?
- search tool often fails to find articles that do indeed contain the word searched for
- when you tell the search tool to search local news, it brings up stories from all the knight-ridder newspapers. If I am searchingt he KC site why would I want to see search results from Miami?

Anonymous said...

i'm there!