![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Griping about information density
Nov. 23rd, 2013 09:45 pmThe latest in irresponsible reporting: "Collisions, snow squalls shut down highways. See where." from a link on the Weather Network's site. This is not how we headline warnings. Warnings are important. People need to know where the hell they can't be driving.
Does anyone else find that the drive for multimedia on news websites makes them avoid news websites? I don't just mean that there are ads everywhere and the images and videos make everything ridiculously slow to load. I mean that images and videos are actually a pretty ineffective means of finding the kind of information one went to the page for. I don't want to watch a video, I want to skim an article and actually leave with the information I want.
For once I agree with BBC Sherlock: I prefer to do my own editing.
Not to mention slideshows. One page per soundbite is the least efficient information layout I can think of. Which means, of course, that there's more space for ads.
Fred Clark mentioned that the newspaper he used to work at had an online policy the staff unofficially called "Fuck the Capricorns": split up the horoscopes over two pages so the last few signs have to click twice, and look at more ads.
We need to figure out a new model here, and no one's even come close to one yet.
The hilarious part, of course, is that our eyes are trained to ignore image ads already. I suppose making content look like ads is more ethical than making ads look like content.
Does anyone else find that the drive for multimedia on news websites makes them avoid news websites? I don't just mean that there are ads everywhere and the images and videos make everything ridiculously slow to load. I mean that images and videos are actually a pretty ineffective means of finding the kind of information one went to the page for. I don't want to watch a video, I want to skim an article and actually leave with the information I want.
For once I agree with BBC Sherlock: I prefer to do my own editing.
Not to mention slideshows. One page per soundbite is the least efficient information layout I can think of. Which means, of course, that there's more space for ads.
Fred Clark mentioned that the newspaper he used to work at had an online policy the staff unofficially called "Fuck the Capricorns": split up the horoscopes over two pages so the last few signs have to click twice, and look at more ads.
We need to figure out a new model here, and no one's even come close to one yet.
The hilarious part, of course, is that our eyes are trained to ignore image ads already. I suppose making content look like ads is more ethical than making ads look like content.