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March 31, 2004
Back to the bad old days
The Dallas Morning News is the one of the 10-largest newspapers in the United States, and it's the flagship property of the Belo company. The News used to have a good-looking website, too. (I helped launch the site in 1996 with my old buddy, Mark Weinberg.)
Unfortunately for readers, The Morning News website has been assimilated into the corporate design machine, an inelegant and garish presentation, circa 1994. Belo's corporate cloning mandate has each of its television station and newspaper websites looking exactly the same, without a hint of local branding (see pict of the Dallasnews.com site below).
It's hard to imagine what parent company Belo company is thinking by presenting enduring and well-respected local media leaders in a zombie-like, soulless manner. Maybe it has something to do with creating shareholder value.
Customers are probably thinking worse.
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As a native Dallasite and former journalist turned Internet product manager, I would totally agree -- the DMN site is completely disappointing. But maybe it's on purpose, as I would have cancelled my print subscription years ago if I could find anything worthwhile there. A search usually doesn't include all relevant answers, and the layout gags me.
Ben,
I couldn't agree more. I can see what the corporate suits are going for, consistent branding and design across the corporate chain and all that. However, the boring neutral design that is crowded with tons of links doesn't really help.
Simplify, pare down things down to make it easy to find what you are looking for rather than throwing everything at a visitor right on the front page.
Another example of this bad corporate marketing is www.canada.com. Although they do a better job of offering more local content on each city's page the crowded, uniform look ruins the site for me. I still do use it however, but as rarely as possible.
I am strongly in favor of simplification. I'll always pick HTML over Flash (except for explanatory graphics) any day.
But Belo's simplification program has genericized its valuable content. There's no there there.
Google has a very simple interface, but it would never remove the Google logo from all of its pages.
