And this happened when you clicked on the above Google link at the start of this thread, and then clicked on the first item in the search results page?
I'm outside the US (São Paulo, Brazil) and could skip the paywall by clicking via the google search link (although by now the article is way down in the list).
This article was disappointing. I was expecting slightly more in-depth analysis into the workings of Craigslist and instead I got a rant about Newspaper websites.
The general trick is to search for a substring using Google and then click off of the search page; the pay wall isn't in place if the referring web site is Google.
Funny, I came in expecting very little and was pleased with the article. A few quotes:
> Indeed, I submit that it's hard to look at virtually any news site out there and not notice how its architecture and presentation differ from that of Craigslist, which has several times any news site's number of users.
> So it's not surprising that the single most salient weakness of a mainstream news site is that in the end it is a corporate showcase, a striking contrast to the Craigslist model. The vocabulary of the architecture speaks plainly that the page is there to serve not readers, but to articulate the structure of the company behind it.
> That architecture is depressingly similar. The typical news site doesn't take advantage of the wide horizontal window of the browser. Instead, it is framed inside a square or vertical box. And inside that frame, the reader is presented with four or five—and sometimes even seven or eight—horizontal lines of information or navigation before the first actual story headline appears.
> Ultimately, I would like about 99% fewer navigation links on the page, but will settle for 90% fewer. For that service, a newspaper site can hit me with all the ads it wants, or charge me any amount of money. But until it provides this simple and I think obvious service to readers, one can't help suspecting that a newspaper's approach to the Web is incomplete.
Some very good design points there, and those are just a few sentences I chose. I learned a little bit, so I think this one is worth the short read.
If you are interested in how Craigslist works on the technical side you should listen to episode 199 of the Hanselminutes poscast where the host talks at length with one of the main developers at Craigslist. The episode is here: http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=217
There is no depth. There is nothing to analyse. "He thought about what his users wanted, and put very little on his site that wasn't useful to them." That's it.
The piece you're critiquing is a WSJ editorial, written for a generalist audience. Wyman may be the only media critic out there pushing the argument that it's not just the business model but the technical design of newspaper sites that's holding them back. It's hard to say there's nothing to his argument.
Yes, his more detailed piece (in two parts) tells far more.
And it isn't only insightful about the blunders of the newspaper industry, much of it applies to the mess that is commercial t.v. broadcasting and the broadcaster websites as well. (at least for the U.S.)
What I meant was that there was nothing to the workings of Craigslist--it really is that simple--and not to Wyman's argument, which I agree with, though I realize now that it wasn't clear. Thanks for the link, though!
One way to look at this is that the original design of HTML
1.1 and its presentation in early web browsers gave users what they really wanted. Text, one color, that goes all the way across the screen, is readable on any screen, and scrolls all the way down to the end of the document. Links. Maybe some images.
No foofaraw of sidebars and mastheads; no bother with zooming to make the content part of the page readable, no need to search the cluttered page to find the print button so you can read the whole article without clicking next 10 times.
That was a subtle part of the early appeal of the web circa 1994. The minimalism sucked you in, it made the web feel like one coherent, unified thing, unlike the constellation of corporate edifices occupying much of it today.
In Craigslist, early Google, even Hacker News, I see echos of that minimalism, filtered through all the ways that have emerged to enhance, and pollute the original vision of the web.
Because what Craigslist's users really want is a completely broken spam flagging system, a mass of data that's impossible to categorize, and a lazy search system that doesn't have any useful boolean search option, and a monopoly that owns all of the search listings for certain regions but has failed to innovate in 13 years.
I use Craigslist. I don't give a crap about any of those things.
I don't care about them because the only thing I need it to do is to help me find a roommate, sell my stuff, or maybe find a date.
When I post a roommate opening to CL, I get responses immediately. If I write it up well, I might get 10-15 responses with 4-5 being good ones. That's all I need to do. I don't give a rip about search or flagging or monopolies. When I post something there, do I get e-mails in my inbox? Yes. Mission accomplished.
Last summer Wired magazine ran a cover story on Craigslist, the classified-advertising Web site, and its founder, Craig Newmark. Craigslist, the headline read, was a mess. The story said the site was underdeveloped. It refused to monetize itself. Mr. Newmark wouldn't add new features, and his motivations were obscure.
Indeed, so poorly is Craigslist run that it's easily one of the 20 biggest Web sites in the U.S. and, according to Wired, likely topped $100 million in revenue last year. It did this with minimal effort and with a staff an order of magnitude or two smaller than those of other sites its size. Those are two things that can not be said about most Web sites in the U.S., and certainly not about the New York Times, which announced last month it would be shifting its Web operation to a modified pay set-up in 2011.
The details are as yet sketchy, but the paper plans to adopt a metered model. Subscribers—daily or Sunday—get everything. Nonsubscribers get to see a few articles every month; after that, they will be invited to pay some sort of fee. The move is designed to take advantage of the traffic that search engines bring to the site, but still target the moochers.
The Times has invested heavily in the Web. You can't accuse it of not taking the medium seriously. Unlike Craigslist it highly monetizes its Web site, makes a hefty amount from it, and deserves to do whatever it wants to make money to support its extensive news operation. Indeed, the move makes terrestrial subscriptions more valuable—a smart way to maximize that revenue stream.
That said, let's remember that the road to charging for content on the Internet is strewn with media roadkill, including the Times's short-lived TimesSelect experiment, which launched in 2005 and folded in 2007.
With all humility toward the very smart people at the Times, I submit that they can learn a thing or two from the lowly Craigslist. Indeed, I submit that it's hard to look at virtually any news site out there and not notice how its architecture and presentation differ from that of Craigslist, which has several times any news site's number of users.
Craig Newmark did one simple thing: He thought about what his users wanted, and put very little on his site that wasn't useful to them. Craigslist's mission is merely to make it easy for people to sell an old refrigerator, or look for a roommate, or find someone to date. By just about any metric the site serves those users as well as any business on the Internet, with the arguable exception of Google.
For decades, newspapers made billions in profits by tending their local monopolies and felt quite important in the process. So it's not surprising that the single most salient weakness of a mainstream news site is that in the end it is a corporate showcase, a striking contrast to the Craigslist model. The vocabulary of the architecture speaks plainly that the page is there to serve not readers, but to articulate the structure of the company behind it.
That architecture is depressingly similar. The typical news site doesn't take advantage of the wide horizontal window of the browser. Instead, it is framed inside a square or vertical box. And inside that frame, the reader is presented with four or five—and sometimes even seven or eight—horizontal lines of information or navigation before the first actual story headline appears. (The Wall Street Journal site, which, it should be noted, has never given away its content for free, has more than a half-dozen lines of foofaraw before a reader is granted a story headline.)
The stories are as a rule stuffed into a cramped space in the bottom middle of the page, hemmed in by myriad other links, devices and widgets arrayed in columns to either side. Headlines, forced to fit in those tiny spaces, are often as awkward and telegrammatic as print ones.
Even after the reader clicks on a story, the site then offers up more of the same: A frame inside the browser window, unwanted navigation elements, links to any and every possible department of the s...
While we're at it, we should all put our heads together and figure out ways to screw all the YC/HN/etc startups and use their services without paying their premium fees. After all, if I want something, I deserve it, right?
29 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 83.9 ms ] thread"What Newspapers Can Learn From Craigslist
"Craig Newmark did one simple thing: He thought about what his users truly wanted.
"BY BILL WYMAN"
Good essay on site design philosophy.
If so, are you coming from outside the US?
The general trick is to search for a substring using Google and then click off of the search page; the pay wall isn't in place if the referring web site is Google.
> Indeed, I submit that it's hard to look at virtually any news site out there and not notice how its architecture and presentation differ from that of Craigslist, which has several times any news site's number of users.
> So it's not surprising that the single most salient weakness of a mainstream news site is that in the end it is a corporate showcase, a striking contrast to the Craigslist model. The vocabulary of the architecture speaks plainly that the page is there to serve not readers, but to articulate the structure of the company behind it.
> That architecture is depressingly similar. The typical news site doesn't take advantage of the wide horizontal window of the browser. Instead, it is framed inside a square or vertical box. And inside that frame, the reader is presented with four or five—and sometimes even seven or eight—horizontal lines of information or navigation before the first actual story headline appears.
> Ultimately, I would like about 99% fewer navigation links on the page, but will settle for 90% fewer. For that service, a newspaper site can hit me with all the ads it wants, or charge me any amount of money. But until it provides this simple and I think obvious service to readers, one can't help suspecting that a newspaper's approach to the Web is incomplete.
Some very good design points there, and those are just a few sentences I chose. I learned a little bit, so I think this one is worth the short read.
http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reaso...
The piece you're critiquing is a WSJ editorial, written for a generalist audience. Wyman may be the only media critic out there pushing the argument that it's not just the business model but the technical design of newspaper sites that's holding them back. It's hard to say there's nothing to his argument.
No foofaraw of sidebars and mastheads; no bother with zooming to make the content part of the page readable, no need to search the cluttered page to find the print button so you can read the whole article without clicking next 10 times.
That was a subtle part of the early appeal of the web circa 1994. The minimalism sucked you in, it made the web feel like one coherent, unified thing, unlike the constellation of corporate edifices occupying much of it today.
In Craigslist, early Google, even Hacker News, I see echos of that minimalism, filtered through all the ways that have emerged to enhance, and pollute the original vision of the web.
I don't care about them because the only thing I need it to do is to help me find a roommate, sell my stuff, or maybe find a date.
When I post a roommate opening to CL, I get responses immediately. If I write it up well, I might get 10-15 responses with 4-5 being good ones. That's all I need to do. I don't give a rip about search or flagging or monopolies. When I post something there, do I get e-mails in my inbox? Yes. Mission accomplished.
Stable. Reliable. Functional. Google, MS, Apple can't even get that right.
Everybody who "knows how to fix it" should just go ahead and blow CL out of the water!
Last summer Wired magazine ran a cover story on Craigslist, the classified-advertising Web site, and its founder, Craig Newmark. Craigslist, the headline read, was a mess. The story said the site was underdeveloped. It refused to monetize itself. Mr. Newmark wouldn't add new features, and his motivations were obscure.
Indeed, so poorly is Craigslist run that it's easily one of the 20 biggest Web sites in the U.S. and, according to Wired, likely topped $100 million in revenue last year. It did this with minimal effort and with a staff an order of magnitude or two smaller than those of other sites its size. Those are two things that can not be said about most Web sites in the U.S., and certainly not about the New York Times, which announced last month it would be shifting its Web operation to a modified pay set-up in 2011.
The details are as yet sketchy, but the paper plans to adopt a metered model. Subscribers—daily or Sunday—get everything. Nonsubscribers get to see a few articles every month; after that, they will be invited to pay some sort of fee. The move is designed to take advantage of the traffic that search engines bring to the site, but still target the moochers.
The Times has invested heavily in the Web. You can't accuse it of not taking the medium seriously. Unlike Craigslist it highly monetizes its Web site, makes a hefty amount from it, and deserves to do whatever it wants to make money to support its extensive news operation. Indeed, the move makes terrestrial subscriptions more valuable—a smart way to maximize that revenue stream.
That said, let's remember that the road to charging for content on the Internet is strewn with media roadkill, including the Times's short-lived TimesSelect experiment, which launched in 2005 and folded in 2007.
With all humility toward the very smart people at the Times, I submit that they can learn a thing or two from the lowly Craigslist. Indeed, I submit that it's hard to look at virtually any news site out there and not notice how its architecture and presentation differ from that of Craigslist, which has several times any news site's number of users.
Craig Newmark did one simple thing: He thought about what his users wanted, and put very little on his site that wasn't useful to them. Craigslist's mission is merely to make it easy for people to sell an old refrigerator, or look for a roommate, or find someone to date. By just about any metric the site serves those users as well as any business on the Internet, with the arguable exception of Google.
For decades, newspapers made billions in profits by tending their local monopolies and felt quite important in the process. So it's not surprising that the single most salient weakness of a mainstream news site is that in the end it is a corporate showcase, a striking contrast to the Craigslist model. The vocabulary of the architecture speaks plainly that the page is there to serve not readers, but to articulate the structure of the company behind it.
That architecture is depressingly similar. The typical news site doesn't take advantage of the wide horizontal window of the browser. Instead, it is framed inside a square or vertical box. And inside that frame, the reader is presented with four or five—and sometimes even seven or eight—horizontal lines of information or navigation before the first actual story headline appears. (The Wall Street Journal site, which, it should be noted, has never given away its content for free, has more than a half-dozen lines of foofaraw before a reader is granted a story headline.)
The stories are as a rule stuffed into a cramped space in the bottom middle of the page, hemmed in by myriad other links, devices and widgets arrayed in columns to either side. Headlines, forced to fit in those tiny spaces, are often as awkward and telegrammatic as print ones.
Even after the reader clicks on a story, the site then offers up more of the same: A frame inside the browser window, unwanted navigation elements, links to any and every possible department of the s...