Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists

Evaluating one of the best sites out there

Well this post poses a bit of a dilemma for me. I work as a copy editor for The Daily Collegian, an independently-run student newspaper at Penn State. Therefore, I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to critically evaluate the paper, although I will say that we are doing more to update our blogs and bring more multimedia content online.

The other newspaper in town, the Centre Daily Times is our competitor so it’s probably not fair for me to comment on them either.

Which leaves my “hometown” newspaper — The Washington Post. I prefer the paper’s design to that of the New York Times which I think sometimes has too many one column stories on the front.

Online, the Post does an equally, if not even greater, job of presenting the news and providing plenty of multimedia content. The front site is amazingly easy to navigate with a photo in the left hand corner to draw the reader in and then a one column view of the top news with small text and links to stories near the bottom of the page.

It also appears that the Post is now twittering live sports but has somehow added the feed directly to their Web site thereby eliminating the need for readers to navigate away from washingtonpost.com to view the feed. This is great because it eliminates the view of some editors that using Twitter during live events could direct traffic away from the main site. As an editor, I would continue to push the use of Twitter, expanding it to other events, such as White House press conferences, Supreme Court hearings among other news events.

The Post has been great about adding video and audio content online and its easy to find stories with such content from the front of the site because of the icons that lead the way. A video and photo gallery bar is located near the end of the page — perhaps that could be moved up for made vertical so that it could fit in the large amount of white space the Post has to the right of the page.

Another great thing about the Post is that it frequently sets up Q & A’s between the reporters and readers, especially with more interesting or investigative stories.

One thing that has to go is the multiple pages for articles. With the Internet, this is no longer necessary as text can virtually go on forever. It’s annoying to have to click to go to the next page and sometimes I don’t read the story past the first part because of that.

For some stories, the Post will prompt you to login or sign up but the site is so good that taking a few minutes to sign up is well worth the time. I’ve been using the site this way for years and only occasionally have to sign in when I’m on a different computer.

Overall, the Post should be what local papers strive to imitate, albeit with a much smaller staff.

Katharine Lackey is a Penn State student, Daily Collegian copy editor and Northern Virginia native who blogs at “Beyond Print: Into the Prism“