Newspapers 2.0

The internet is a VERY fast changing place, so newspapers could be forgiven for not keeping up with the pace of change. They could if it wasn’t for the fact that within a decade or two the net will be their ‘majority’ publishing platform.

A number of national newspapers change VERY quickly and adopt new concepts and technologies as they come out. Others fail on this count spectacularly.

Some are for obvious reasons, they don’t like the concept of publishing content on a platform that’s free – but they’ll wake up to the importance eventually – after all if newspaper sales and advertising revenue keeps falling they won’t have much choice.

Anyway, I’ve been posting a lot about newspaper websites recently. Mainly about specific sites after a re-launch. The reasonably effective re-launch of The Times Online or the complete missed opportunity of the Daily Mirror.

So this time I’m going to do a full, proper roundup of the UK’s national daily newspapers internet standing. I’ll look at each aspect of what a paper should be doing in a 2.0 world and how effectively they’re doing it.

It may be that this becomes a series instead of a single post. The goal at the start was to do a single review of all the papers but I’m thinking of doing a post for each category and review all the papers under that grouping in each post.

For simplicity purposes I’m going to be looking at: The Independent, The Guardian, The Sun, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Star, Daily Mirror, The Times and The Telegraph.

I’ll also only be concentrating on the main section of the site. The first page the user comes to and one level below (the article itself).

So to kick off we’re going to look at one of the MOST important aspects of the ‘current’ web trend, the social sharing side of the modern internet. I’m going to call it Diggability.

Diggability

This is basically how easy it is for someone who happens to stumble on an article to share that article with other people – by posting it to Digg, newsvine, del.icio.us et al.

Yes I know you could easily just copy the URL, go to Digg, click submit a story and paste the URL in there but various studies have shown that people don’t use the web that way.

So to be Diggable a site needs to have links to at least two main social sharing sites somewhere on the article page (ideally at the bottom) that takes the user directly to the submit story page (if the story hasn’t been submitted already) or too the article on the social sharing site so the user can blog it or just join the conversation.

So we start with a quick look at our test subject to see which fit the bill. Surprisingly only three of the nine papers in our test group are diggable. The rest fail this review and won’t even be considered.

So which three make the grade? Well it’s the three that have had the most recent re-designs to be honest. The Daily Mirror, The Times and The Daily Telegraph.

Not having a recent re-design isn’t a valid excuse though. Including social links at the bottom of an article page isn’t exactly rocket science. If the site is using a reasonably good content management system then it’s just a case of changing the template.

Anyway, of the three that are diggable, the one that fits the bill the most (linking to as many social sharing sites as you can without looking cluttered or like a link whore) is the one with the oldest design – The Daily Telegraph.

I have split the Times and the Mirror into second and third but to be honest it’s more a case of joint second because they both link to a bookmarking and social news website and they both have icons for the sites.

But I dropped Times to third because of a lack of Digg link. You can have Newsvine but in addition to Digg not instead.

Second is the Daily Mirror because they have icons AND link to the two more popular sites, Digg and del.icio.us.

So The Daily Telegraph then. The Telegraph is first because it has links to del.icio.us, Newsvine, Digg, NowPublic and Reddit. They’ve covered a full spectrum, linked to a range of sites and managed to have it not look cluttered.

So why are social sites important? Basically because it’s a very simple way of people finding stories and content they might be interested in. It’s a case of peer review, peer suggestion.

In a similar way that years ago people would cut articles out of a newspaper or magazine for friends and family – now they post the article to Digg for friends, family and total strangers to read.

Next Time

Next review will look at linkability. There are two sides to this – linking in and linking out. Having permalinks to specific pieces of content is nearly as important as joining the conversation – or having relevant links to other sites with related content.

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