June 30, 2003, 1:59 AM ET
Targeted ads way off the mark
I spent a long time today reading about last night's porch-collapse tragedy in Chicago. I grew up in the Chicago area and knew one of the people who died in the incident.
Reading the news was shocking enough, but it was especially disgusting to see how one news site presented inappropriate advertising with its coverage. After reading the Chicago Sun Times' account, I was shocked to see text ads for San Francisco Stairs and deckrailings.com, two companies that construct porch-related materials:
The ads appeared at the bottom of the story, as if to say, "Do you have a porch? Do you want to prevent this from happening to you? Well, check out our products." This is a sick, sick exploitation of a loss of human life.
And that wasn't all. I reloaded the page a few times and saw even more inappropriate ads -- links to Aluminum deck railings, Construction books/videos and a list of "Top 9 Must-Do Home Repairs for the Summer."
As Web advertising systems become sophisticated enough to allow for ultra-targeted advertising based on content, online ad programmers should keep in mind that targeted ads aren't always appropriate. Sometimes they're infuriating.
June 24, 2003, 10:52 PM ET
PHP/MySQL at washingtonpost.com
Washingtonpost.com has selected a PHP/MySQL-based content-management system for its new entertainment calendar, according to news-technology company NewsEngin.
Hooray for my favorite scripting language/database combination. It's always nice to see PHP/MySQL getting props in high places.
This is a Slashdot flame war ready to happen.
June 24, 2003, 11:24 AM ET
Official BBC News RSS feeds are up
Kevin Hinde, head of technical development for BBC News Interactive, writes to tell me about the BBC's new RSS feeds. He says the site now has feeds for every news index, and sports will be following soon.
I've made a bookmarklet that gives you the RSS feed for a particular page or section front on the BBC News Web site. If you're at the Business | Your Money page, for instance, clicking the bookmarklet will take you to the Business | Your Money RSS feed. I was able to pull this off because the BBC uses standardized URLs for its feeds and its pages.
I opted to make a bookmarklet instead of listing the feeds because some sections, such as 2003 summer music festivals, aren't necessarily permanent, and I'm sure new sections (and, hence, feeds) will be added with some frequency.
The bookmarklet works like any other -- just drag it to your bookmark list and click it at your leisure. Here it is:
Get BBC RSS feed for this page
I've tested it only on MozillaFirebird for Linux. Bug fixes welcome.
June 23, 2003, 2:11 AM ET
Hacks, hacks, hacks...
Three cases of poorly executed closed-content walls:
- Beebo.Org has revealed a free and easy way to access online New York Times articles that are more than a week old (and are supposed to be obtainable only via the paid archives).
- The Wall Street Journal has a similar security hole that allows free access to Journal stories, which are supposed to be behind a paid-registration wall. As in the Times hack, one may access Journal stories by making a quick and easy change to a story's URL. I saw this reported on a weblog late last year, but the article has been removed.
- Salon.com's "premium" content wall is defeatable with modifications to the cookies on your computer, as explained in the latest issue of 2600.
If news organizations are serious about making users pay for content, they'd do well to plug the security holes. Otherwise, I encourage them to just let the Web be the free, global library it should be.
June 21, 2003, 5:25 PM ET
Server switch
I just switched Web hosting providers, and it should take about two days for the DNS to update across the Web. If you see this entry, your ISP is using the new DNS. Or something like that.
In the meantime, while the update takes place, user comments left on the old site might not be seen by everyone -- although I'll do the best I can to migrate them to the new site.
If none of this makes sense to you, don't worry. Things will be back to normal in two or three days.
UPDATE, 10 minutes later: I've updated my old server to automatically redirect to the new server's IP address, so that nobody will get stuck looking at, and posting comments on, the old server. The upshot: You might see a strange number instead of "holovaty.com" in your browser's location bar. Rest assured this will go away in a few days and will have no ill effect on your Holovaty.com browsing experience.
My only concern with this method is that some RSS readers may not be able to handle such automatic redirects (does anyone know?); but I'm hoping that users of such RSS readers would notice a problem, visit this site in a Web browser and see this note for the explanation.
June 17, 2003, 3:27 PM ET
Why news sites don't need specialized blog systems
I just posted this to Poynter's online-news listserv. I was responding to an editor of a major news site who was asking about which blog software to use on his site.
> I'm looking for recommendations for
> good blog software ... I'm open for
> suggestions. We're also looking at building
> our own, but if I can find the right
> software for the right price, we'll go with
> that.
I highly recommend integrating a self-built system into your legacy CMS, if you've got the means to do it. Ideally, if you've got a good CMS already and it's customizable enough, just extend it to produce "blog" output. Honestly, weblogs are nothing special -- they're just another form of article.
The allure of specialized weblog publishing systems is that they make Web publishing easy for non-technical users. Producers of news sites are not non-technical users; producers of news sites have an idea of how to publish content on the Web already -- and they have the tools to do it. (Well, for the most part.) Do you really want to introduce an extra layer of complexity into your site by bringing in *a whole other publishing system* just to manage the weblogs?
An online producer shouldn't have to use a scattered mess of publishing systems just to get stuff done. There shouldn't be a standalone "poll tool," a standalone "blog system" and yet another "main newspaper content system." The goal should be to unify these tools, not to decentralize them.
June 14, 2003, 8:44 PM ET
Survey: Text-messaging increasingly popular
BBC News: Young 'prefer texting to calls'.
Text messages have superseded phone calls as the most common use for a mobile phone among young people, a new survey reveals.
It's not clear whether this survey's focus was Britain or the world, but either way this struck me as news that online information providers should be acting on.
At work, our lawrence.com events calendar includes a "remind me of this event on my cell phone" component, which sends you a text-message reminder at a time of your choosing. Is anybody else doing anything cool with text-messaging? I'm familiar with Major League Baseball's text-messaging service at mlb.com, but otherwise it seems to me that, in the U.S. at least, information providers aren't doing much -- or maybe they just aren't publicizing it.
June 13, 2003, 1:09 PM ET
Innovative online ad is not necessarily accurate
A short while ago, Steve Outing of E-Media Tidbits pointed out an innovative Flash banner ad for a 13-hour sale at Marshall Field's department stores, which is running on the home pages of Detnews.com and Freep.com today and tomorrow. The ad has a countdown clock showing how much time is left before the sale. Here's what it looked like on my computer a few minutes ago:
It's an innovative ad, but there's a problem: Like the "current Baghdad time" clocks and baseball-strike countdown I've written about previously, it relies on the user's computer settings to provide correct time. My experience, from several years' worth of using public computers at libraries and universities, is that computer clocks are not often set correctly.
Hence, if your computer's clock is off by a year or so, this is what you'll see:
A more realistic, and less contrived, problem happens if your computer's clock is off by just a few hours; in that case, the ad will be inaccurate, but not so inaccurate that you'd question it.
June 9, 2003, 2:58 AM ET
Wrapping up Find The Web Editor's Name And E-Mail Address Week
Find The Web Editor's Name And E-Mail Address Week, during which I chronicled my efforts to find staff contact information on six news Web sites (latimes.com, ABCNEWS.com, FortWayne.com, sacbee.com, MSNBC.com and NYTimes.com), has come to an end. What, if anything, can we take away from this?
Well, the conclusion is that finding contact information on these news sites tended to be difficult. Of the six sites surveyed, only one -- sacbee.com -- made it easy for me to get contact information quickly. Of the remaining five, two -- ABCNEWS.com and MSNBC.com -- did not appear to feature contact information at all, and the other three buried it so deeply that any reader who wasn't a dorky online-news blogger doing some crazy experiment (or reader of said dorky online-news blogger's site) likely wouldn't have the patience to search for it.
Are these six sites representative of news Web sites as a whole? I believe they are. Despite the fact that staff members of various news Web operations e-mailed me throughout the week to plug their own sites -- "you won't have trouble finding that information on our site" -- my experience has taught me that news sites with readily available contact pages are the exception to the rule.
The overwhelming question is: Why? Here, in no particular order, are the reasons I've come up with. Please do comment below if you have anything to add.
Why sites don't publish contact information
- Spam concerns. Steve Outing pointed out in a recent E-Media Tidbits post:
"Could it be that when news sites publish staff names and e-mail addresses, spammers collect the addresses and inundate them with junk e-mail?"
Certainly this is a valid concern, but there are several ways to hide e-mail addresses from spam bots, including character encoding, JavaScript hacking and rewriting addresses in plain English. As I described in Saturday's entry, The New York Times uses a novel approach: It sends you a staff contact directory via e-mail when you send a blank message to staff [at] nytimes [dot] com. - Lack of design skill and/or usability testing. Ironically, one of the aforementioned editors who e-mailed me to say "you won't have trouble finding that information on our site" was, well, wrong. I took him up on the challenge, and it took me about seven clicks to find the information. I think lots of times Web folks will become so acclimated to how their site works that they assume users have that same knowledge. And, in other cases, it just boils down to bad design decisions and poorly worded links.
- Fear of raving lunatics. Some people just plain don't want to be contacted. Mark, who commented on my latimes.com entry, wrote this:
"Frankly I don't blame them for making it difficult. I can say as as a webmaster of a news site, I don't want to be contacted. When a site did have my name on it, I would get the most bizzare email, because people simply do not read the job title of the recipient they send to."
In response, I'll point you to Sara's and Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman's comments on that same page. I'll also say that, as a former employee of a high-traffic metropolitan news site, I know that the signal-to-noise ratio for "generic" e-mail boxes at such sites is low; but the few "non-noise" reader e-mails make it worthwhile. - Holier-than-thou attitude. This is closely related to the previous reason. I honestly believe some news site operators don't want to be contacted simply because they think they know better than readers do. This is an ugly throwback to the age of news-disseminators-as-gatekeepers; I would think we'd gotten past that. Reader Robert Skole sent me these related thoughts:
"I think that editors create the position of 'Readers' Ombudsman' in order to avoid speaking directly to readers. Perhaps if the NY Times made it easy to get feed-back from readers, they would have been suffiently warned about Jayson Blair to take action long ago."
- Staff shifts make it a hassle to change contact information. Oh, it's a hassle to change the information on a single page of your site?
Why publishing contact information is important
There wouldn't be a point to this exercise if contact information weren't an essential part of a news site. Here are my thoughts on why it's important -- and why the results of this little experiment are disturbing:
- Contact information adds credibility and a "human element." Two of the 10 Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility are important to consider here: "Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site" and "Make it easy to contact you." As Julie put it in a comment on Tuesday's entry, it's important to underline the fact that your site's journalism is produced by real, accountable humans -- "not just some anonymous, news-producing machine." And speaking of machines, isn't it ironic that the same journalists who decried the new Google News service late last year for making news judgments with no human intervention, don't post readily available contact information on their own sites? Without contact information, your site might as well be computer-generated.
- Reader feedback is a good thing. Without readers, we'd be nothing. The least we can do is listen to what they want -- and provide easy ways for them to tell us what that is.
- Lacking contact information sends a negative message -- that your Web staff doesn't want to hear feedback. That's not a good vibe to be sending, particularly in this age of public distrust in the media.
- A blanket "contact us" Web form or generic e-mail address isn't for everybody. Yes, the anonymity of such a form is attractive to some (and I'm all in favor of those types of forms, because some folks wouldn't comment otherwise), but, on the flipside, readers might be turned off for that same reason. It's one thing to be able to submit site feedback via a blanket form that will send your message God-knows-where; it's another to have the full name and direct e-mail address of the person you know is most likely to help you.
- Believe it or not, there are legitimate uses for the names and e-mail addresses of staff members. Examples: A job hunter might like to be able to address her cover letter to a real person, not to "Whom It May Concern." A humble online-news blogger might want to e-mail a news site's designer to congratulate him or her on a great use of CSS. Tony Wright of Weber Shandwick needs to contact editors of news sites to conduct business; Mr. Wright wrote, on the online-news discussion list, that his job regularly requires him to find such contact information but that news sites don't make it easy for him, leading to wasted time and frustration.
How contact information should be presented
A few final thoughts on best practices, after a week's worth of bouncing around a handful of sites:
- Use the phrase "Contact us." In every experiment this past week, I found myself scanning the pages for that exact phrase. And it's no secret why: "Contact us" is the de facto standard Web way to link to a contact page. It's what we've all been conditioned to look for. See Jakob's Law of the Internet User Experience. Non-traditional wordings -- "E-mail us," "Send a message to our staff," "Staff contact information" -- tended to trip me up.
- Put the "Contact us" link in a standard location. In other words, it shouldn't go smack-dab in the middle of the navigation. I've been conditioned into believing that "Contact us," like "About us," is secondary-level information: It's not the main focus of a site, so it shouldn't necessarily be displayed front and center, but it should be easily found in a secondary location. Good places: The bottom of a vertical navigation bar, the right of a horizontal navigation bar, the bottom of a page.
- After I've found the "Contact us" link, reward me; don't make me search more. Too often I found that a "Contact us" link was deceiving -- instead of taking me to contact information, it took me to a disorganized page on which I was forced to search again for the information I wanted. Clicking "Contact us" on the New York Times' home page, for example, takes me to a monster of a page that presents dozens of choices, seemingly spewed on the page with little or no thought given to organization.
My favorite contact page on a news Web site is the one on The Maneater, the University of Missouri's student newspaper. The page, which I made during my tenure there, is short, to-the-point and offers a wealth of well-organized information. I'm sure there are other good news-site contact pages out there; I encourage you to post a comment with links to pages -- your own, or otherwise -- that are especially well done.
June 7, 2003, 3:07 AM ET
Finding the Web editor at NYTimes.com
This week's festivities are almost over, but we've got one last site to check: The Gray Lady.
The New York Times Online has been criticized for not printing reporters' e-mail addresses on its story pages. Is it equally protective of the contact information for its higher-ranking staff? Let's find out.
On the home page, I scan the left rail for an appropriate link. "About NYTDigital" catches my eye because of the word "about"; clicking that takes me to nytdigital.com, which has a significantly different design and navigation scheme.
I'm a bit startled by the change, but the navigation seems extremely simple: The five links are "Learn about us," "Contact us," "Work for us," "Advertise with us," and "Partner with us." Clearly "Contact us" is what I want. I click it.
The resulting page doesn't seem to offer much information, and I move my mouse toward the Back button -- but, just in time, I notice the secondary navigation: "NYTD," "NYTimes.com," "Boston.com" and "The New York Times Company." Aha! I click "NYTimes.com," but only after stopping for a second to consider what, exactly, the difference is between "NYTD" and "NYTimes.com." (What's the difference? I don't know, and I'm not sure any other normal user would know.) I'll come back to "NYTD" later, in case "NYTimes.com" doesn't give me the information I need.
Unfortunately, that's the case. The "NYTimes.com" page, looks almost exactly the same as the previous page! I try the "NYTD" link in the navigation, but it turns out I've already seen that page.
Now I try the "Learn about us" link in the navigation, but nothing happens. That's because the link points to this page itself; and that's a coding error. I click Back several times and keep moving my mouse over the "Learn about us" link to see whether the link worked on the current page. Finally, I'm back on the main nytdigital.com page, and the "Learn about us" link works. I click it.
Now I'm on the Who we are page, which doesn't contain much content but has a fair-sized secondary navigation bar. I click "Management."
All right! This page, titled "Management Team," lists the names of 10 of the highest-ranking NYTimes.com staff members. Each manager's name is underlined; assuming these are mailto: links, I move my mouse over the first link -- but it's not an e-mail address, it's a full link that appears to be a individual detail page for this staff member. I click that link.
The resulting Martin Nisenholtz page offers a medium-sized bio of Mr. Nisenholtz, along with a short description of what he does for NYTimes.com. This information is great -- but his e-mail address isn't listed on the page!
Thinking maybe Mr. Nisenholtz's page is a special case (because of his high rank), I click Back and try the page of Leonard M. Apcar, the site's Editor-in-Chief. Again, the page gives plenty of personal information about Mr. Apcar, but it does not include an e-mail address. I give up on this section: It gave me some, but not all, of the information I was looking for.
But wait: I'm not done. I go back to the nytimes.com home page and scan the navigation links for something else that might help. I see, at the bottom of the page, a "Contact us" link. Could this lead me to the same page I saw before? Maybe. But what have I got to lose? I click it.
Ah! This is new. I'm now in the "Member Center," and there are several helpful "contact" links -- including the line: "For more details, visit How to Contact the News Staff of NYTimes.com." That sounds like exactly what I want. I click it.
Now I'm on the How to Contact the News Staff page. I'm so close, I can practically smell it. The page asks: "Want to contact someone specific at The New York Times or NYTimes.com?" Yes! Yes!
Oh. In order to do that, I've got to "Send a blank message to [staff at nytimes dot com] for an automated response containing the e-mail addresses of New York Times staff members who have made them available to the public." Interesting: This seems to be a sneaky, but smart, way of protecting Times staffers' e-mail addresses from spammers.
Is this an acceptable way of providing staff e-mail addresses? It sure is, in my book; I fully understand the Times' concern over protecting addresses from spammers, and because I sympathize with anyone who's battling spam, I don't mind the minor inconvenience. If anything, I'd say it's more convenient to have the staff contact list in my KMail e-mail program than it would be to have to look up e-mail addresses on a Web site.
I send an e-mail to [staff at nytimes dot com], as instructed, and receive what appears to be a comprehensive staff e-mail directory of the New York Times within a minute. It includes staff from all over the newspaper -- not just from the Web site. Nice! I'm one happy customer, even though it took a while to find this. (Which, ironically, is probably why I'm so excited to find this information -- because it took some effort.) Kudos to the Times for providing this feature. It's a shame it took me so long to find.
Tomorrow: A wrapup of this week's findings.
June 6, 2003, 12:44 AM ET
Finding the Web editor at MSNBC.com
Find The Web Editor's Name And E-Mail Address Week continues. Yesterday, I had quite a bit of luck finding contact information on sacbee.com. Today I'll tackle MSNBC.com.
On the home page, I first check the left rail for any sign of "contact" or "about," then move to the bottom of the page. There, I spot the small text menu with links to, among other things, "Help" and "Write Us" -- plus something called "InfoCenter." (Whatever that is. Perhaps I'll have the satisfaction of finding out later.)
I decide "Write Us" is my best bet -- it's the option most directly related to the concept of contacting staff members -- so I click it.
The subsequent page greets me with a large graphic. I choose "How do I contact MSNBC.com?", which jumps me down the page several paragraphs. Alas, this page only lists generic e-mail addresses per site section: News, Business, Sports, etc. No names found. After scrolling down and back up the page in search of any other e-mail addresses, I give up on "Write Us" and click Back. Nothing appears to happen; then I realize I had clicked an in-page link earlier, and that click had incremented my browser's Back-button history even though my action hadn't technically loaded a new page. I hate it when that happens. I click Back a second time.
Now I'm back on the home page. I try "Help," but I quickly realize that that page is more focused on technical help than contact information. I click Back.
What's left? That "InfoCenter" thing. OK, I'll bite. The word had been intriguing me, anyway.
Aha! The InfoCenter appears to be a wealth of site-related information. I pause for a second to consider that this page calls it the "Information Center," whereas the home page (from which I accessed this) had listed it as "InfoCenter." Why the inconsistency?
I move my mouse over the "Contact us" header but realize it's not a link. Then I try that section's first bulleted item -- "Letters to the Editor" -- but it takes me to a page that lists the current letters to the editor, not methods of submitting them. I feel a bit misled. I click the Back button.
Now I try "Write us," which is the other link under "Contact us." Doh, that's a page I've already seen. Back.
Now, I look at the "About our Company" section, under which "About us" seems to be the only link that might help. I click that.
The resulting About us page is not helpful, despite the fact that it offers one piece of information: The site's editor in chief is named Dean Wright. I learn this because the page happens to feature a mission-statement-ish quote attributed to Mr. Wright. (Having worked at several Web sites in my day, though, I know how easy it is to forget to update information like this. If a new editor in chief were hired, would the staff immediately think to change this information? I'm reluctant to trust it.)
I'm a bit peeved at this point, so I rank the page a "1" in the "Would you recommend this story to other readers?" poll at the bottom of the page, out of spite. Doh! That takes me to a thank-you page, from which I click Back to get back on track. And I click Back again to the Information Center -- that cruel mistress.
I pause for a while to figure out exactly what I should do. "Business opportunities," under "Do Business with us," might have some staff information; I learned on Monday that this sort of page can indeed be helpful. OK, I click it -- but I come up empty-handed. Back.
Oh! I haven't clicked "FAQ'S" yet. Oh. Never mind. Back.
I'm burned out on the Information Center. It doesn't appear to have any else that could help me. I click Back to return to the home page, where nothing's left for me to try. I am a failure.
Please leave a comment if you've managed to find MSNBC.com's staff information. I give up. And I can't help thinking that, if MSNBC.com had followed the example of its corporate parent and featured a talking paper-clip helper in its product, perhaps none of this would have happened.
June 5, 2003, 1:03 AM ET
Finding the Web editor at sacbee.com
Let's continue this week's activities. Today's stop: sacbee.com, of Sacramento, California.
After scanning the navigation bar at the top of the home page, I make the left rail my next stop. "Contact us" is a clear link near the top of the list.
On the subsequent page, the "Contact the Bee," my eyes jump directly to the bold "Contact the Bee" headline and continue downward, all the way to the bottom of the page. No luck; the page content is devoted mostly to driving directions and features no online-staff contact information.
But just before I click the Back button, I notice a phrase in the page's first paragraph is bolded: "Click on the contact links above." Aha! I'd skipped the in-page navigation links entirely. I'd unconsciously, and incorrectly, assumed they were either advertising links, part of the global navigation or some other useless distraction.
(It's worth mentioning here that I do not regularly read sacbee.com, and, for that reason, I'm not accustomed to the site's unconventional navigation placement. Had I been a regular reader, I probably would have been conditioned to associate that part of the page with the act of navigating a subsection.)
I click "Online Staff." Hallelujah! The page lists staff member names, positions, e-mail addresses and even phone numbers (for some folks). This is exactly what I was looking for, and it's a refreshing change from my frustrating experiences of the past three days. Despite the slight hiccup, I'm a happy customer.
Let's hope my good luck keeps up. See you tomorrow.
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June 4, 2003, 12:39 AM ET
Finding the Web editor at FortWayne.com
Find The Web Editor's Name And E-Mail Address Week, which has been rather depressing so far, stumbles along today with a visit to FortWayne.com, a medium-sized news site based in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
On the home page, I almost immediately spot the "Contact Us" link near the top-left corner; this is a good sign.
Following that link takes me to a well-organized Contact Us page:
I stop for a second to ponder which of the three "Contacts" links to click -- "Fortwayne.com," "News-Sentinel" or "Journal Gazette." I noticed on the home page that this site features the content of both Fort Wayne's newspapers (which operate under a joint-operating agreement), but I'm not sure who oversees the Web site -- members of both staffs or an independent team. I make a guess and click "Fortwayne.com;" surely this page must contain contact information for the FortWayne.com staff.
Well, it does, technically, but seven of the eight e-mail addresses on the page are generic -- such as marketing@knightridder.com -- and only one real name is given. The only non-generic e-mail address belongs to the sole staff member listed under "FortWayne.com Team" -- a salesperson. Where are the Web nerds? Surely this salesperson cannot be maintaining the site by himself. I click the Back button.
This time, I try "About Fortwayne.com," which takes me to an informative FAQ page that does include some newspaper contacts, but no Web staff. I click Back again.
Now I try the News-Sentinel "Contacts" link. Aha! It takes me to a beautiful list of newspaper contacts, complete with full names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. I'm so excited, I'm practically shaking. But wait...I see the publisher, the managing editor, the editorial page editor, even the secretary -- but no Web staff! I look up and down this page twice to make sure I didn't miss it, but the Web staff isn't there. I click Back again, dejected.
OK. Chin up. Maybe the Web people are on the other newspaper's staff. I click "Contacts" in the Journal-Gazette section, but the resulting page doesn't have any staff members' names, let alone e-mail addresses. I spot a "Complete list of newspaper staff" link at the bottom of the page; unfortunately, that page isn't any better. (In fact, it's pretty much, word-for-word, the same page as the previous one!) I click Back, and Back again, to return to the main Contacts section front -- a page that once looked so promising.
For the third day in a row, I give up. Again, I ask your help in finding that site's Web editors' names and e-mail addresses. Tomorrow, I'll wipe my tears and try again.
June 3, 2003, 1:13 AM ET
Finding the Web editor at ABCNEWS.com
Find The Web Editor's Name And E-Mail Address Week continues today with a trip to ABCNEWS.com.
After the home page loads, I quickly locate the navigation -- found in the left rail -- and scan it downward. In no time at all, I spot a link to "contact ABC." Simple.
On the subsequent E-mail ABCNEWS page, my eyes quickly skip over the "ABC Television Shows" section and focus on the "ABCNEWS.com" section -- the right half of the content area:
I skim the choices: ABCNEWS.com Content ... ABCNEWS.com Technical Assistance ... Video & Audio ... Only the first two seem relevant to my task. I click the first link.
Whoa. Things were going so well, but all of a sudden I'm at the ABCNEWS.com Content FAQ. I quickly scan the questions and realize that the page doesn't appear to have any staff information. It does say, under "I want to send my comment, suggestion or opinion," that "We do not personally respond to comments, opinions and suggestions."
That doesn't bode well, but I continue looking.
Ah! A glimmer of hope. At the bottom of the page I notice a paragraph that says:
This FAQ page was created to provide you with an immediate answer to your question. If you are unable to find an answer to your question on this FAQ page please go here to contact us.
I follow the link, but it takes me to the "Content and Technical Contact Us Form", which would be helpful if I were just trying to contact anybody on the site's staff -- but not a particular person. I click the Back button once, twice, three times to get back to the home page.
Now I try scrolling to the bottom of the home page, where I find links to "HELP," "CONTACT ABC" and "PR." I try "HELP."
On the resulting page, ABCNEWS.com Toolkit, only one section looks like it might be helpful: "Tech support."
I move my mouse to click "here," but out of sheer luck, I notice that the words "Tech support" link to a different Web address than the word "here" in the body copy. What the heck? Which one do I click? Guess I'll try both. I click "Tech support," but it merely gives me another form to fill out. I click Back and try the "here" link, but the resulting page is a strange amalgamy of answers to various 1999-era browser questions (e.g., how to clear the cache of the Netscape 2.0 browser). Suffice it to say staff e-mails are not on this page. I click Back again, and Back once or twice more to return to the home page, empty-handed.
Not done yet. I click the "CONTACT ABC" link at the bottom of the home page; maybe it's different than the one I saw before. Nope, it isn't. I try "TOOLBOX," and that takes me to the same page I got when I clicked "HELP" -- even though "HELP" and "TOOLS" are two distinct options of the same horizontal menu at the bottom of the home page, and one would assume two different links lead to two different pages. Finally, I try "PR," but that doesn't help, either.
I give up. Estimated time spent: Two minutes. If you can figure out how to find ABCNEWS.com's staff listings on its Web site, please share.
How depressing. Tomorrow, I'll see how a smaller-market news site fares.
June 2, 2003, 12:53 AM ET
Finding the Web editor at latimes.com
Welcome to Find The Web Editor's Name And E-Mail Address Week.
Each day this week, I'll go to a news Web site with a sole mission: To find the full name and e-mail address of that site's Web editor. (Or new media director, online editor, webmaster or whatever the head honcho of the site is titled.)
Simple enough, right? I think we'll find some sites don't make it simple.
I'll write, in great detail, about my thought process as I browse. This approach is inspired by Steve Krug's excellent book "Don't Make Me Think" -- particularly this page of it. And I repeat the disclaimer Krug gives in the book: "Granted, much of this 'mental chatter' takes place in a fraction of a second, but you can see that it's a pretty noisy process." Also, it bears saying that the thought processes I record here will be authentic; in other words, I won't have made them particularly lengthy just to make a point.
At the end of the week, I'll analyze the week's worth of experiments (along with your comments) to see whether we can come up with some sort of best practice on where to put the web editor's name and e-mail address on a news site. Now, without further ado...
Our first stop is latimes.com, the site of the Los Angeles Times in California.
Starting at the home page, I scan the gray bar in the top right of the page from left to right, looking for the words "Contact us" or "About." Not found.
I scan the left rail from top to bottom, looking for "Contact us" or "About." Not found.
I scroll down to the bottom of the page to see whether it includes a "Contact us" or "About" link. No.
I return to the top of the page and look at the gray bar more closely, reading each option to myself slowly, one at a time. "Home?" No, that's not it. "Register?" No. "Home delivery?" No. "Site map?" Well, maybe, but I'll keep trying and come back to it if needed. "Archives?" No. "Print Edition?" Well, no, but what does that mean, anyway? "Advertise?" No. "Feedback?" Hmm, could be. "Help?" Surely the information I need is in there somewhere, but how does it compare to my other choices?
The choice is down to "site map," "feedback" or "help." I'll try "Feedback," because that sounds like an area where I might find staff names and e-mail addresses. I click "feedback."
On the feedback page, I immediately see the words "Contact department" above a drop-down menu. OK, I can contact a particular department; that's gotta be it. I click the drop-down menu and look for "Internet." Not there. I look for "Web." Ah ... "Website" is a choice. I select it and click "Go."
I get a "Website feedback" form. Doh. This is convenient for people who want to submit feedback to an unnamed staff member at the site, but it's not what I'm looking for. I click the Back button.
I examine the feedback page more closely. Ah, there's a "Times Staff" header, with a text box that lets me type in a staff member's name. I don't know the name of the editor, though -- that's what I'm trying to find out. Fortunately there's a link to the "Editorial Directory." I click it.
Now I'm on the Editorial staff page. OK, the info has got to be here; the page looks comprehensive. I can tell by my scrollbar that this is a long page, so I stop to examine the "Daily sections" and "Weekly sections" headers at the top of the page; maybe they can help me narrow down the information. I scan them for "Internet" or "Web." Not found. I slow down and look closely at each choice. None of them has anything to do with the Web staff! I try doing an in-page search for the word "internet." Only one occurrence was found: The name of the "Convergence/Internet Entertainment" reporter. I do another in-page search, this time for "web." Again, only one occurrence found: "Tracy Weber." Shoot. This is frustrating. I click the Back button.
Now I comb the "How to Contact the Los Angeles Times" page, looking for anything that will help me. Nothing. I click the Back button again.
Now I'm back at the home page. My eyes go back to that gray bar. What was it I clicked last time? "Feedback" or "Help"? I can't tell, because the site doesn't distinguish between visited and non-visited links in that piece of the page. I'm pretty sure I clicked "Feedback" last time, so this time I'll try "Help." I click "Help."
Now I'm on the Site Services page. Whoa, a bunch of questions and answers. I skim the main section headers -- "Accessing Content," "Content Delivery," "Help Using Features and Accounts" ... and "Contacting Us." Bingo. The "contact us" link under the first question is grayed out, which must mean I've visited that page before, so I skip that. "Subscription services"? No. Ah, there's an "Inside the Times section" where I can "learn more about [my] site and [my] newspaper." I'll try that page.
Now I'm on the Inside the Times page. I scan the list for the words "e-mail" or "contact." Not found. I look at the list slowly. Ah, "Editorial directory" sounds like it would help, but haven't I already been at the editorial directory? Maybe this is another editorial directory; the link color doesn't tell me that I've already been at that page. I click it. Shoot; that's the page I already looked at. I click the Back button.
Once again on the Inside the Times page, I try the "Executives" link, which sends me to a list of the executives and doesn't not include any Web folks. I click the Back button and try the "Masthead" link, which yields another unhelpful page.
Extremely frustrated, I give it two last chances as a final resort: the site map and search engine. Both turn up nothing. I call it quits.
If you can find that information on latimes.com, please leave a comment here, along with how you found it. You will have won my respect.
Tomorrow, I'll tackle another high-traffic news site. Let's hope it makes my task a little easier.
An ironic footnote: The Los Angeles Times has a Content Not Available on Our Web Site page.
UPDATE, 15 minutes later: Out of disappointment and disbelief in my searching abilities, I continued to search. And I found it! Hidden in the left rail of the "Site Services" section is a link to Business Contacts, which includes the name and e-mail address of the site's managers. Who woulda thought.
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