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Firstly, yes, I live in a glass house. I’m the editor of DMagazine.com, and we ourselves recently launched a new version of our own site that continues to have flaws and bugs that we’re working to correct. Websites are never actually “finished.”
But I couldn’t help taking delight in the comments that the Dallas Morning News has received about its relaunched DallasNews.com. Digital readers are a finicky bunch, and if you make changes that force them to update their bookmarks or click more often than they used to in order to find a story, they’re going to express their displeasure, some in more colorful language than others:
That first commenter hits upon my own biggest criticism of the new look, which has been publicly accessible for almost three months now, but which the newspaper multiplatform content-generation distribution network only officially released this week.
You’ve probably heard that readers using mobile devices have been accounting for an increasing share of all online traffic over the last several years. For DMagazine.com, mobile accounts for a little bit more half of our traffic at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the share is even greater for a site like DallasNews.com, which produces much more timely breaking news each day than do we.
Anyway, the importance of mobile is why you’ve seen so many websites (including DMagazine.com) move to what’s termed “responsive design,” where a story’s presentation is resized or changed slightly depending on whether the user is on a desktop, phone, or tablet.
What you see now on DallasNews.com is an example of an overreaction to the needs of mobile. They’re hardly the only site to take this approach, but they’ve essentially made the calculated decision to let content look worse on desktop browsers in the interests of having it look much better on a mobile device.
So you get every story blown up with giant photos that run across the entirety of your screen, no matter the quality of the image. The result is absurdities like this, as our own Zac Crain has pointed out previously:
Or this:
Look, I have had to throw generic stock photography onto articles plenty of times myself. I feel for the reporter or producer who, locked in by the photo-centric demands of the site’s redesign, was desperate for any picture at all with which to illustrate this news. But when you end up trivializing a story about gun violence with a comically large photo of two dice, aren’t you doing more damage than good to your reputation?
Thing is, neither of those stories and their pics look nearly so bad on mobile, because the image, and the image’s size relative to the text, is much smaller. It works OK. All the indicators we have (and I’m sure the Morning News has) demonstrate that readers are far more likely to click on headlines accompanied by pictures than those without, especially when shared via social media.
However, serving those needs in this one-size-fits-all style means giving your desktop/laptop readers a much crappier experience. Maybe DallasNews.com is pulling something like 80+% mobile traffic, so they don’t feel they have to care about that other 20%?
Anyway, the beautiful thing about “the cyber” is that I could be proven dead wrong in questioning this decision. Every visit will be tracked. Pageviews and time-on-site and social sharing and ad impressions will go up or go down, and the Morning News will know whether the changes worked. They don’t have to guess. They’ll have the data. Maybe they’ll make adjustments. Or maybe they’re right.
There’s one thing they can’t possibly be right about though: that new logo is awful.
Oh, and I hope that the Gannett sale doesn’t happen. Gannett papers have the worst, most aggravatingly slow and buggy websites around. DallasNews.com is a dream by comparison.
