Schizophrenia in Delivery

I've been getting bored, or is annoyed the right word, recently with the endless segregation of 'Web' and 'print' content in this industry. It's everywhere.

"...Shooting video for the Web."

"...Writing for the blog."

It seems like everyone's doing it from community papers to national giants. Such statements are rife in organizations populated by members of the media, showing it's not just a corporate-induced groupthink. Today, the NPPA announced the Best of Photojournalism 2008 Web Video Winners. Of course I certainly don't have any problem with the contest, or with displaying video online. In fact, there's some really cool video in there. But the name alone makes that vein in my forehead throb.

But why are we segregating what we do for print versus what we do with the Internet? Why isn't the BOP Web video judged against/with video produced for TV? Aren't they the same product?

Rather than embracing the Web as another tool for storytelling (albeit one we haven't been able to make profitable yet), we treat it like a schizophrenic may treat an alternate personality: this other thing that needs attention, but isn't part of who we are.

It is a sickness within the industry that some 10 years after the Internet became widely available, we're still treating it as a secondary, burdensome, afterthought initiative.

And it shows...

For most papers, not nearly enough thought goes into page (site) design.

Where papers will have staff usually in the 10s of people to handle nightly design, Web sites sit and fester for months or years at a time seeing only minor revisions in design.

Publications have failed to recognize that people view Web pages in ways not available circa 1997. We have mobile platforms (Palm devices, Windows Mobile devices, iPhones and others). Sure, it is difficult to code compliant sites for all those devices, but at this point "Works on most, most of the time" would be a start.

We have much higher speed connections than the 28.8kbps standard in the late 90's. Rather than running microscopic photos (and then usually only the ones that appeared in the print edition), give users an opportunity to click them and make them huge. Publish photos that didn't appear in the paper. Design for 800x600, or even 1024x768 died, or should have died, a while ago.

Finding new ways of electronically delivering content is critical. People don't necessarily want to log onto sites to read. Allow them to opt-in for direct SMS-delivered news stories. When they do have time or interest for viewing the full site, give them something more. Heck, a company logo (read: ad) delivered with every text could be a possible revenue stream. It's harder to block ads embedded in SMS than on a Web site too.

As an example of making things easier for the consumer, credit card companies have gone to offering touch payment instead of swipe payment. It makes it faster, easier and gives the customer less time to figure out he might not want to charge a bag of Cheetos. What's our version of touch payment? Ideally it will get people to not only buy, but enjoy the product.

We need to either transition our full efforts to making the Web an equal (if not greater) product than our printed pieces or to let go of it altogether and hope that people go back to buying papers every morning.

*NOTE: Edited for grammatical clarification -WS