Heralding back to the time I spent heralding the Miami Herald

Dear Miami Herald,

Over the past three months I have been assessing you on a weekly basis as part of a school assignment, critiquing the quality and multimedia nous of news websites. My final verdict is, you’re failing.

It is all there. Blogs. News both international, national and local. Some Twitter. Video. Photos.

The problem is there’s no integration. No thought put in as to how you can enhance the storytelling of your organization. I never got past feeling that things were just put up here. A website is not just something a newspaper should have, it is an equally important dimension of the media equation.

There’s hope here for you. Set a goal. Set a focus. THINK. Use the platform and the resources at your disposal. Think about how to keep a reader. Think of the internet experience and the experience of a newsreader.

Yours Sincerely,

James Robinson

Wasting great news

LAWSUIT: WOMEN BEAT HOMELESS MEN FOR SEX FETISH VIDEO CLIPS.

If there is a headline that more immediately screams out to the reader, read this, or the puppy gets it, I’d be shocked.

A lawsuit has been filed after a number of homeless men were spotted bloodied and bruised about town in St. Petersburg. It is a shocking story, but also deeply in tune with all of our baser National Enquirer-loving instincts. With the story on the website, we have no photos, and no video. Without overstepping decency, there are avenues for some great visual elements. Screenshots of websites, photos and/videos of plaintiffs, injured homeless men, for a start.  We don’t get any of this. We get two hyperlinks, one to the website of company making the videos (with little explanation or context provided for the link on the page) and one to the company providing legal aid (why, why do we need this?).

2012 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES ‘FRIEND’ SOCIAL MEDIA. This is a cute little news piece. The ‘what politicians are doing with social media and how angle’ is still relatively fresh. But there’s no social media incorporated into the page, no Twitter visuals, no links to the Twitter pages of those mentioned. We get a haphazardly assembled photo-gallery of four unconnected photos of some of the people mentioned, but nothing else. It is a story on social media, that throws inflexible blocks of text at you.

I’m hammering the same themes, every week here. So much missed opportunity. The Miami Herald needs to realize that a website is not something that you need to have, in order to keep up and it is not something you can phone in. It is something you can use to enhance and improve your stories.

LeBron James v Hard News

I’ve grumbled often about how the Miami Herald does not put a lot of energy into seamlessly integrating top shelf multimedia content into its website experience. Today though, thinking ahead to this evening’s Boston Celtics versus Miami Heat game, I paid extra-special attention to the sports news. It was a pleasant surprise.

The Herald – so often runs any multimedia content on similar subjects (on the rare chance it exists) in different parts of the website, leaving people to go hunting themselves. The site puts efforts into making slick basketball videos, with commentary, and a runs a blog on the team. And here, finally, was evidence of the Herald putting a clear effort into tying it all together for a reader.

Of course I hated it. But that is more because I’m not a Miami Heat guy. But even seeing that much LeBron James I could still appreciate the effort.

But then also this morning, I saw the Herald‘s long-form Sunday story of the day on a shady local Mayor and his shady banking empire, it is a very in-depth, thorough and heavily reported story. It was a great read. But it was run with a photo gallery with only two images, and a plea to upload your own photos and videos, with little specification of why, and what they’re after.

It seems a shame. I know sports are popular, but it’d be great to also see the Herald try and use the new multimedia tools to put positive focus on their writing.

O, Miami… Herald.

For the next few entries, I’ve decided not to blatantly criticize, but instead show how I, if provided the opportunity, would utilize the multimedia form in a better, and more complete way than the Miami Herald.

In a small box on the bottom left of the homepage this morning, I saw a link for a video promoting the O, Miami festival, an event apparently aiming to reach everyone in the county with a poem. It is a standard, relatively smoothly produced, short video piece on a quirky community event. It piqued my interest, but was run with the video, with no text, and no links to other information. This video cannot itself be the news, there’s too small an amount of information in the video, and I had so many questions left. Who? What? Why? How long? To me, video needs to be utilized as part of the news, not become an excuse to ignore essential elements of stories. I scrolled back, and found another link next to it. Miami Herald had hired a poet for April to write poetry about the news. Cool idea, huh! A great way to promote an event and involve people in news stories they might read over. It seemed like a great plan, but I could so easily have missed this. I would have promoted this prominently on the homepage. And still, I had no idea of anything about the O, Miami poetry festival itself. I felt jipped. Interest piqued, but curiosity definitely not sated.

Photos of the day: a good idea to center visually arresting images within one easy to navigate slideshow. But, there’s such a disconnect here. It has no correlation to any story prominently featured on the site for the day, it is all AP content from around the world and nation, and the homepage seems to place such a premium on local content over this. There’s also little context about the news given. What we have is just images, with no thought offered. I would co-ordinate this feature into the news of the day and goals of the site.

Finally, for now, a really well written column on union crackdowns by Pulitzer Prize winning writer Leonard Pitts. Give me hyperlinks to news coverage of this. Give me photos, at the least. Some video, some context.

Please?

Blogs.

I delved into the blogs on the Miami Herald website this week, making it through all 31 of them. They are definitely a little patchy in quality, but I felt that the volume of them meant that there would probably be something for everyone in the long run, you know? I dwelled longer on some (sports, politics, entertainment) than others (pets, Cuban issues, a blog for mothers seeking the ideal work/life balance). So I do applaud them for that.

The first issue I felt with the blogs is delivery. All 31 blogs are laid out at the bottom of the page (there’s a ‘featured’ blogs tab above it that displays six of the best, or most topical) without any indexing or attempts to sort into subjects and listings. Alternatively, there’s no integrating that I could see of relevant blog links into news articles whose subjects correspond. They’re just dumped at the bottom of the page. A simple subjects tab, or something to sort them into areas of interest could boost readership through not scaring anyone away. It is a lot of text to get through for impatient browsers.

Tone-wise, they’re good. Like I said, some are better than others.

I spotted a particularly egregious oversight though. There is virtually no hyperlinking. Out of the 31 blogs, only 11 featured hyperlinking. The Internet brings the capacity for hypertext, allows an author to provide context, strengthen the transparency of their source material and bring a reader up to speed more quickly by showing them the light on articles they didn’t have the time to write themselves. By this point, it is a given, or it should be (I think) that this basic stuff would be part and parcel of having a blog. On The New York Times website, out of an extremely scientific sampling of ten blogs, all ten featured hyperlinking heavily.

So there.

I’ve been hammering on for a while about how the Miami Herald has very poor national and international news coverage. It is on the site, somewhere, but you have to navigate through two or three screens to get to it. So I was tickled to see that on the Cuban issues blog, a post about a visit from Jimmy Carter to the region linked to a Boston.com-run, AP penned article on the story.