New media bring new problems

More and more readers are coming to The News & Observer's online site to get their news. In January, the paper's Web site, www.newsobserver.com, was used by 2 million unique visitors. That's up from fewer than a million in the same month a year earlier.

The N&O is making significant investment in enhancing the site, adding staff and new features regularly. It's becoming close to a 24-hour news source, and I find myself going to it regularly during the day to check what's new.

But as the site becomes more robust and more heavily used, opportunities for problems increase. I'm getting an increasing number of gripes from people about the Web site, and I thought I'd pass some on.

* REGISTRATION. If you go deeply into The N&O site, maybe five page views, the system requires you to register with The N&O to open more pages. That means filling out a form supplying name, gender, age, ZIP code, e-mail address and other personal information. Some of the requested information is voluntary, but the form's length can be daunting.

Anyone who has tried to casually browse a Web site -- The N&O's or any other -- knows the frustration and annoyance of having a wall thrown up when you're just trying to get information.

* OBITUARIES. The complaint I get most often has to do with a recent change in the Web site's display of obituaries online. Before the change, they appeared much as in the paper -- each full obit listed in order. "As a native of Franklin County, N.C., I have been able for a long time to keep up with the obits of my family and friends in Franklin County," wrote Ashley Gilliam of Norfolk, Va. "However, I have been unable to do so in the last few months. Have you changed your format?"

Yes. Under a Jan. 1 change to a new obit format called Legacy, you're given a list of the names of people who have died, but not the obituary details. To get those, you have to click on the name. That's an obstacle for people who aren't looking for names but who just like to browse obits to see who has died (or to make sure their own names aren't there.) One African-American reader says he likes to scan for the names of funeral homes in the obits because that tells him whether the deceased was black.

* LONG STORIES: The N&O recently has taken to splitting long stories, requiring another mouse click if you want to read the continuation, or "jump." This is an irritation to some people. "I absolutely detest jump pages in online news. There is just absolutely no reason to jump anything short enough to have run in a newspaper," wrote a reader who identified him/herself only as Bella.

Other papers, Bella wrote, give you a choice of the full-length or jump version.

* PRINTER-FRIENDLY. The paper's "printer-friendly" version of online stories, which changes the layout for printing out, is not friendly, readers say. It keeps the box of promotional material that appears on the Web page. And if you try to copy articles from the story archive into a document, says Sandra Keener of Durham, it comes out poorly formatted. Keener knows; as administrative assistant for the City of Durham, she copies a lot of N&O articles for city council members.

Really, if these are the worst reader problems with online, The N&O is in pretty good shape. I consider most minor. But that doesn't mean they don't need fixing.

Gary Smith, The N&O's vice president for interactive media, said he recognizes that the registration requirement is burdensome. "We're in the process of evaluating what it would take for us to remove registration from the site if you just want to come in and browse," he said. Registration might be required only when the user wants to become interactive -- submit a photo, say, or comment on a blog. "At that point, they have something to get out of it, so prompting them to register is less obtrusive," he said. The paper is also looking at reducing the length of the registration form.