I’ve never had a problem with the Times-Picayune. As daily newspapers go, it does its job. Dailys are supposed to be huge, lumbering behemoths whose responsibility it is to be the most accurate and thorough reporter of news in any given city. The daily doesn’t have to be edgy or artistic. It needs simply to report the news quickly and accurately with a healthy dose of investigation and a fundamental understanding of what is newsworthy and what isn’t. And in this respect the Times-Picayune performs its task admirably. It seems a tad cloistered in its hard-to-reach Howard Ave. offices but hey, I don’t hold that against them.
I do have a problem however with their Web presence, Nola.com.
Time and time again, it seems Nola.com just mails it in, is asleep at the wheel and wouldn’t know a grip-and-grin from a double-truck.
Now, it must be said that Nola.com and the Times-Picayune are owned by the same company and run the same editorial copy but the union between the two ends there. They don’t share the same offices and they don’t share the same staff other than the T-P writers whose bylines appear under the stories. These writers I don’t have a problem with. Bravo to them. Excellent journalists.
But the staff at Nola.com…
The wages must be higher at the main office because Nola.com always seems to slack when it comes to simple stuff like copy writing and/or journalism basics such as headlines and cutlines.
Case in point. On today’s Nola.com page, there is an article about hookers following the influx of construction workers who have arrived in town post-Katrina. Great article. Worthy of the main page. In fact, I think it actually WAS on the page earlier this month. That’s right, the story is dated Oct. 8. It’s almost 10 days old and now it has magically reappeared on the main page of the Web site. Guess today was a slow news day. Nothing else was going on?
Then there are the numerous links that go nowhere. The other day they advertised a link that was going to show video of the recent shooting in front of the Praline Connection in the Marigny. Hey why not right? I clicked the link. Sorry. Page not found. Did the person who uploaded this link check to see if it even worked? Or perhaps it was the last thing he or she did that day and they just hit “enter” then ran out the door en route to Lucy’s Retired Surfer Bar?
There are others. In a recent story about a murder in Mid-City they said only one house on the block “have been occupied” since the storm. Then last Saturday they had a headline that read “Louisiana Lottery results” right above another headline that read “Louisiana Lottery Results.” On Oct. 8 they actually had the sentence, “They were died at the scene,” in an article about two people murdered in the 9th Ward. “They were died at the scene.” Wow. Whose typing this stuff? I have screencaps of all these errors if anyone doesn’t believe me.
I know Nola.com recently won a Knight Foundation Award for Public Service. I know this because they bragged about it on their main page for what seemed like an entire week. Meanwhile other news was being left off. YOU aren’t the news guys.
Then there are the ridiculous poll questions they ask. Do you think prostitution is a problem in the French Quarter? Do you carry a handgun? Do you like to watch parades during Mardi Gras? Okay, I made that last one up but the questions always seem to be not the least bit divisive and, honestly, a bit stupid. Never have the results surprised me.
Don’t get me started on their annoying practice of forcing people to fill out a form stating their zip code, age and sex before browsing to another page. Is marketing really that important to them? So much that they will risk pissing of their page’s viewers? I just fill in 12345 as my zip and 2006 as my birth year. Then I tell them I am a woman. Even though I’m not. I have a penis. Tee hee.
It’s not that I don’t visit Nola.com. I have to because of its association with the T-P (and don’t think for a second that I would lower myself to visit a TV news Web site). It’s just that their lax attempts at presenting the news in a revered manner piss me off when I do.
If I wanted lackadaisical presentation of the news, I’d read blogs.