Tt post mar 8 2016 - more about media website bloat

"I watched Spotlight last week. It won the award for best film, and detailed how the Boston Globe investigative team uncovered the pedophile priest scandal in the Boston archdiocese."

And that reporting occurred or began in 2002.

• January 6, 2002 - Boston Globe - Church allowed abuse by priest for years

A little about the Globe's Spotlight team:

In 2001, The Boston Globe hires a new editor, Marty Baron. Baron meets Walter "Robby" Robinson, the editor of the Spotlight team, a small group of journalists writing investigative articles that take months to research and publish.

Today, that will be tough to replicate at small to mid-sized local daily newspapers.

A good documentary to watch is Black and White and Dead All Over. It used to exist on Netflix.

... a 2013 documentary film ... Black and White and Dead All Over portrays the struggles of American newspapers to maintain circulation and editorial quality in the early 21st century. It primarily focuses on hardships within the Philadelphia Daily News, a 90-year-old newspaper that has undergone numerous ownership changes and bankruptcy proceedings in the past decade

January 2002. Think about what did not exist at that time. Even MySpace did not exist in January 2002. Wordpress did not exist. Friendster launched in March 2002.

Wordpress today :

The open-source WordPress publishing platform now powers more than 25% of sites on the web.

Prior to January 2002, we had LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger, Movable Type, GeoCities, Tripod, Wikipedia, PalmPilot, and BlackBerry.

But no Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, smartphones, App Store, responsive web design, etc.

In 2002, most web access outside of work occurred at home with a dial-up connection, using a desktop or laptop computer. And I bet many residences at that time had one desktop computer that was shared by everyone in the residence.

October 2003 Toledo Talk thread that pointed to a Blade story, published that same month and year, titled: Area still cool to wireless-fidelity, but in a few places it's hot in Toledo

High speed wireless-fidelity Internet connections, or WiFi connections as they are called, have begun is starting to make inroads in the Toledo area with several “hot spots” popping up at various restaurants, coffee shops, hotels and other public locations.

According to the WiFi Alliance, a nonprofit international association formed to certify wireless network products based on a technical standard, there are now at least nine hot spots -locations where wireless high speed Internet connections will work, or hot spots, in and around the Toledo area.

You can follow news about the media industry by accessing this aggregator site http://mediagazer.com/

A couple stories from this week by the same writer:

• Facebook is eating the world
• Adblocking is a small part of the bigger question, who controls the media?

... adblockers are used by people who don’t wish to harm the news industry, but do wish to halve their mobile phone data bills; in other words adblocking thrives because of a failure towards consumers.

Forcing people to consume advertising that strips their data and costs them money is hardly a vote-winning strategy.

Feb 29, 2016 - Philly.com - Forget 'Spotlight' - There's a war against journalism

Ignore the content of that Philly.com article, regardless of its validity.

Submit the URL for the above Philly.com story into Webpagetest.org for stunning numbers.

Fully Loaded:

• Time: 119.970s - (2 minutes ??!!)
• Requests: 1,201 - (wtf ??!!)
• Bytes in: 15,368 KB - (15.3 megabytes ??!!)
• Cost: $$$$$

The cost rating maxes out at five dollar signs, otherwise, that page would probably be rated 10 dollar signs.

The new Philly.com looks nice on the phone. They redesigned their site recently in order to have one site that displays well on all devices.

http://www.philly.com/philly/about/Redesign.html

Back in December, we released an improved mobile experience. Now you can enjoy a cleaner, more visually appealing Philly.com on larger screens, too.

The article page is at the heart of our content. We have released a fully redesigned article page for all devices. Try one below.

But when you try one of their articles and submit to webpagetest.org, you get the same results. It takes over 100 seconds to load fully. The page makes over 1000 requests. And it's sized over 12 megabytes.

Philly.com has launched a full-scale, shock-and-awe war on web readers.

Another testing service:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Testing with this article from above:
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Forget-Spotlight-Theres-a-war-against-journalism.html

Speed:

• Mobile = 30 / 100
• Desktop = 53 / 100

http://www.toledoblade.com/Featured-Editorial-Home/2016/03/06/Yes-on-Toledo-tax.html

Speed:

• Mobile = 39 / 100
• Desktop = 44 / 100

http://m.toledoblade.com/Featured-Editorial-Home/2016/03/06/Yes-on-Toledo-tax.html

Speed:

• Mobile = 33 / 100
• Desktop = 64 / 100

I don't understand. The mobile version of the Blade's website is slower on mobile than their desktop version, and the mobile version is faster on desktop than their desktop version. At least according Google's PageSpeed test. Whatever, it's all very slow.

http://toledotalk.com/yes-on-toledo-tax.html

Incredibly boring webpage, but it's the same content.

Speed:

• Mobile = 99 / 100
• Desktop = 99 / 100

ToledoTalk.com is hosted on a shared server at HE.net, meaning that TT shares a computer that also hosts dozens of other websites. Obviously, I don't have root access. The speed rating would be 100/100 if I could enable compression within the Apache web server.

For my other sites, I host at Digital Ocean, and I have total access to my own virtual server. I use the Nginx web server. That same HTML page does receive a 100/100 score.

At webpagetest.org:

Fully Loaded:

• Time: 0.535s
• Requests: 2
• Bytes in: 14 KB

Apache at HE.net must be adding some additional info because that
boring ass web page is a little over 8,000 bytes in size on the file system, due to the HTML tags and some CSS.

When the version at Digital Ocean is tested, the Bytes In equals 5 KB, due to Nginx compression.

The same op-ed:

• 5,000 bytes downloaded versus the Blade's version which requires over 5 megabytes to be downloaded.
• Fully loading in under a second versus requiring over 40 seconds to load completely.
• Making only 2 requests versus over 900 requests!!! (what in the hell is going on there?)

I'm always impressed by consumers' ability to tolerate mediocrity and abuse.

I feel bad for the writers, editors, and everyone else at newspaper orgs. Their service is needed at the local level, in my opinion.

But this kind of web design indefensible, and I would never support it with money.

I have no sympathy for media orgs if their business declines when they abuse web readers like this.

Writers and editors may feel that they cannot do anything about their company's wretched web design, but I disagree because I assume that those people also use the web, and they work at these companies.

Anyway, the keys are no JavaScript, no tracking gobblygook, and no ads. The only non-article info on my test page is a link at the bottom of the article that points to the Blade home page.

I suppose that I would be the only person willing to pay a hefty annual subscription fee for content that was displayed that simply. Photos and illustrations are still welcomed. In fact, more images should be posted. Just greatly simplify the delivery container.

A fast, simple delivery mechanism does not improve bad writing. But good writing, important writing can be lost or ignored when the delivery mechanism is a train wreck.

Even digital-only media sites that formed in recent years and never created a print version are designing massively bloated websites.

But I see no improvements in the future by newspaper/media orgs, regarding their reader-hostile web designs. The only change will be that the websites will get worse.

Thanks to slow websites, we will have more services like Facebook's Instant Articles and Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages because most people read on their phones.

Some day, it may be pointless for news orgs to have their own websites because the media orgs will publish their content on many other platforms. It's not Facebook's fault. It's the fault of the publishers for designing web pages in 2016 that are 5 to 15 megabytes in size.

And if the local, daily newspapers close, I'll get my "news" by overhearing pointless third-hand drivel from people who read Facebook.

#media #design #moronism