E-Tarded

The Nashville City Paper publisher comments on his newspaper’s misguided attempt at the online conversion known as an e-paper:

Our long-term plan here is to become a completely online product. When that happens depends on how quickly local advertisers shift dollars from traditional local media to online. The e-paper is an intermediary step in our plan. As a free paper, we rely on our print ads for about 99% of our revenues. Because of that we need to make sure those ads are seen, and the best way to do that–as we slowly reduce our print circulation–is through a product like the e-paper. I wish I could stop putting out a print edition tomorrow and go entirely online, but until local advertisers, who constitute about 90% of our advertiser base, wake up to the power of online advertising, I can’t. So, it has nothing at all to with a “ridiculous belief that online needs to replicate…what is in print.” We fully realize that some readers aren’t going to like the e-paper. But unfortunately, if they want to continue to read our content, they’re going to have to put up with it–at least until such time as local advertisers have online ad budgets that can support the extensive costs involved in putting out a general interest daily newspaper. In my mind it’s a very small price for some readers to pay to have an alternative to the Tennessean. And I believe as long as we keep publishing compelling content, our online readers will pay that price.

I cannot fully put into words how little Mr. Del Favero “gets it.” What we have here is a common case of old media paradigms being unnaturally forced into a new media arena. Anyone who has been a part of internet culture for any length of time knows that this line of thinking is a recipe for irrelevancy.

It’s not hard to understand why the City Paper has taken the awful e-paper route. The thinking is this: “We make our revenue off of ad sales. Advertisers are reluctant to spend money on online campaigns, but are more than happy to cough up money for our hard copy space. Let’s make the online space exactly like the hard copy version, PLUS MORE ADS SURROUNDING IT. How could we lose?”

Well, the truth of the matter is that online readers are fickle. And busy. And they know they have countless options. To think that the City Paper is going to have the market cornered on compelling local content is arrogance. The internet provides unlimited space for an unlimited amount of content, coverage and opinion. To assume that local readers will “put up with” this disaster of a format is naive. Not when their options are so vast.

I wandered over to the City Paper website and clicked on the e-paper just now. I was taken to a screen where I had to register in order to view it. Strike one, fellas. You’ve just turned off a significant number of readers. If I was looking for information on a specific story, went to the City Paper’s E-Paper only to find I had to stop and register, I would turn right around and type what I was looking for into Google News. I’d be sure to find something within seconds. If I was logging in to read the paper from cover-to-cover, then perhaps I would take the time to register. But is that how people read news these days? I don’t think that it is. Those looking for news online are looking for tailored information. And those who do wish to read the paper in its entirety are not going to want to read the content in this god-awful format. The clutter on the front page is ridiculously distracting. There is vastly more space devoted to ads and navigation than content. Unless we are talking about the headlines, you can’t even read the content. The text is too small–to make room for all the ads, I guess.

So, in exploring the City Paper’s new foray into the internet I see a story on the front that I’d like to read. It’s about my old boss, the owner of Tin Angel. Clicking on the image of my former boss on the front page of the e-paper takes me to a pop-up window of the same image, only slightly larger. No text or photo credit accompanies it. What is the point of that? I hover my mouse over the story and see that it is clickable. But once I click I do not get the story, but a pop-up window that suggests the story is on page 9. (?) Once you click the 9, you are taken to the piece itself, however the ‘9′ pop-up window remains. The piece in question is entirely too small to read, so you have to click on a portion of the e-paper to read it. What pops-up next might be the ugliest text version of a story I have ever seen. No spaces between paragraphs, the accompanying photo stuck crudely at the bottom, etc. Murder on the eyes. There is also a Q&A with the Tin Angel owner on the next page (you wouldn’t know that unless you “flipped” the page), which looks like this once enlarged. No bolded content, no line breaks, no visual distinction between question and answer. A pain in the rear to read.

In flipping through the rest of the e-paper I am taken to an e-paper “how-to”. Even after enlarging the page using the plus sign at the top to make it as big as possible, the text is still unreadable. So, I clicked on the individual elements that were highlighted, only to get the entire page in a pop-up, even smaller this time, and completely illegible. The City Paper’s “how-to” use their e-paper is entirely unreadable, even after copious amounts of clicking and pop-upping. I ask you, how dumb is that? I can’t read the e-paper so you give me instructions on how I can, which I am also unable to read. Brilliant. And the search function is shit. There have been at least three City Paper articles about me, yet in searching my name there are zero results found. Obviously, this is a mistake, as my full name has shown up many times in their paper.

Look, if Del Favero thinks people are going to click on advertising just to read the ad’s copy, he, as my mama used to say, has got another think coming. We are as a society are so bombarded with advertising that most of it goes unnoticed. To assume that anyone would click on an ad to see it enlarged is preposterous, but that is what has to happen at the e-paper in order to read any advertising copy.

Here’s what is most wrong with the City Paper’s e-paper experiment: That is not the way people read content online. It is not familiar to them. This is not the way people consume news on the web. And you cannot force them to, not matter how much you would like that. The e-paper is a mess- -an unnavigable, unintuitive mess- -that no reader, web savvy or not, will find enjoyable. It takes far too much time (read: clicking in vein) to get to the good stuff, and I’m sorry, but the CP’s “good stuff” certainly ain’t good enough for all that trouble.

Mark my words, the City Paper’s E-Paper will fail. I don’t want it to fail, but it is a clear example of old media trying to force their antiquated notions of content delivery onto an audience too smart- -and too tuned in- -to stick with a product that causes major time suckage and frustration. And we’ve seen time and time again that attempting to squeeze outdated formats onto the world’s most customizable content delivery service (The Internets) does not work. The City Paper needs to jump outside their box and rethink their strategy. Who says advertising has to be traditional? Breaking their ties to how things used to work will be the best bet for my friends at the City Paper. Otherwise, they are just spinning their wheels.

RELATED: Mesh Media Strategies, Rex Hammock

ANOTHER THOUGHT: Is the e-paper indexable by Google? If not, that is the biggest mistake of the lot.

AND ANOTHER THING: Rex Hammock jumps feet first into video blogging, and does so with dexterity. He critiques the CP’s e-paper as well, in much kinder, gentler terms. A+++++ WOULD WATCH AGAIN