Fairfax Digital has resurrected a masthead that hasn’t been published since the mid 80s, and is marketing it as “a collection point for commentary and debate on the Fairfax website.” The National Times has undoubtedly been designed to compete in the space that News Limited’s The Punch is successfully occupying, but if day one of its existence is anything to go by it may end up being buried next to its dead tree name-sake.
The first thing that you notice about the National Times is that it seems to have been shoe horned straight into the same blue and white template that both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age use for their online versions. The same Fairfax Digital header, same navigation bar, same links to Drive, RSVP etc, same top five stories from the sister sites. While The Punch quite deliberately removes itself from the visual style of the News Ltd newspaper sites, National Times could easily be a subsection of The Age. While Fairfax Digital would no doubt argue that they are looking to provide consistency, as a reader the design’s lack of differentiation does nothing to engage you into seeing this as a stand alone product.
Not helping the problem caused by a lack of visual differentiation is the content. On the weekend that National Times has launched, it appears little more than a collection of articles from the SMH and The Age. While there does seem to be a bit of unique content scattered amongst the reprints, if you are a regular Fairfax reader already then having to wade through stuff you’ve previously seen will prove annoying. It’s already bad enough trying to find original content between the existing Fairfax Digital offerings, National Times only seems to further muddy the water.
Fairfax have the resources to create almost anything they want under the National Times masthead, sadly their launch day offering look like not much more than an aggregator for their existing content. Unless there’s a drastic change in content first thing Monday morning, many people’s first visit to the National Times will be their last.
Update The National Times twitter feed this morning has posted links to two stories, one of which is on smh.com.au, the other on theage.com.au, each with a National Times header below the main masthead. Neither of the stories are on the front page at the National Times own site. This is looking like a really confused strategy.
8 Comments
Agreed, it’s not making a great first impression. The Punch had a design and mission that marked it as separate from the rest of the News Ltd online content; the National Times doesn’t. Not clearly separating “aggregated” (including already-published Fairfax content) and novel content is one of the clearest symptoms of what seems to be very poor planning.
I’ll mention another Fairfax bugbear that’s carried over to the National Times – their lack of thought about RSS feeds. I’ve long been disappointed that there are no feeds for the opinion content at the SMH or The Age. The National Times has an RSS feed – singular. It seems it’s publishing a synopsis of each “column” published on the site, but most of the entries don’t indicate the author and a lot of them don’t give much information at all. What’s more, from what I can see so far their “blogs” don’t have RSS feeds and don’t even go into the all-in-one feed.
When reading online commentary, I normally start with my RSS feeds, then follow the links to open the articles that sound like they might be interesting. That works fine for any traditional blogging platform, for The Punch and reasonably well for The Australian (again, authors aren’t indicated at The Oz). But with Fairfax outlets – and now with the National Times – I’d have to manually browse the site to make sure I get at any content I want. Maybe they think RSS feeds would reduce the number of page views (and advertising dollars) they would get, but in my case the lack of integration with the way I typically find information means I’ll probably end up visiting the site less.
mUmBRELLA has a commentary from The National Times’ editor Darren Goodsir.
The National Times front page content updated somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30 this morning, I’m not sure if that is a first day glitch, but I think that unless they get that happening a lot earlier they’ll be ignored by early risers who won’t want to revisit the previous day’s front page.
Compare and contrast.
National Times editor Darren Goodsir:
Prominent story on today’s National Times front page:
One more link – commentary from Jason Whittaker.
I thought that someone should comment here besides you guys.
You know what I despise? Adult Harry Potter fans.
I don’t mind the design but I wish the National Times would just stick to original content, as opposed to more regurgitated opinion I don’t care about.
RSS feeds are key. I already sent an email begging for separate feeds from the columnists and bloggers. All Fairfax needs to do is make the feeds a synopsis of the entire article so that they get the page hit when “feed readers” {HAHA} follow the link to the entire article.
OK. Have you people read any of the Ben Pobje crap that’s on this site passing off as satire? Makes Catherine’s stuff tame by comparison.