Saturday, August 11, 2007

More kudos for the SH-T. not.

How not to do it:

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune carries lots of video news clips these days, but it's all just like TV news, because that's what is is: pickups from the associated (Comcast cable) SSN6 news channel. Most of their video clips are anchor-read items, very short, with 10-second pre-roll ads and post-roll ads that are often longer than the news items themselves.

Experienced H-T site users soon learn to close their video pages as soon as the actual stories are over to avoid the overly long post-roll ads, so they probably don't do much good for the businesses that pay for them. Worse, they are repeated endlessly; the same old ads run over and over instead of fresh ones constantly being plugged into the rotation.

It's almost as if someone in an executive capacity at the Herald-Tribune took a course in how to deliver TV-style news as badly as possible, then came home and put everything he or she learned into practice on the paper's website.

- Online Journalism Review, Robin Miller, Editor in Chief for OSTG, owner of Slashdot, NewsForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, SourceForge.net, and the ecommerce site ThinkGeek.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

To be accurate, the useless video clips are mostly produced in-house by the dreadful SNN ("Give us 24 hours and we'll kill you with an infinite repetitive loop of tedious nonsense.")