No more confusing Town Online with bostonherald.com
Gatehouse Media unwrapped its new Town Online sites today (Newton as an example; Roslindale as another).
First impression: Nice, clean design, but putting a couple more stories on the home pages might give the impression there's more that's actually happening in these communities. Also, some weird stylesheet action going on - at first, you get a header and then a blank, brown screen, then the contents pop in (there's also what looks like a first-day publishing bug - at least on the Roslindale and Newton sites, there's no news on the news page). Also, here's hoping that they eventually give users the ability to comment directly on stories (and that these are then collected into forums).
But where's my police blotter? I can't live without my Roslindale/West Roxbury police action! Oh, there it is - it's listed as a sub-tab on the news page. I'm betting that most Town Online readers would rather see Police and Fire as a main tab than "Multimedia," which I bet few people will actually click on.
Comments
Is Proofing to Follow?
Any chance the new publishers will actually hire proofreaders for the newspapers? The number of typos--including the misspelling of names, the cardinal sin of basic journalism--has been a constant scourge of The Lexington Minuteman (and presumably the other locals weeklies).
Proofing?
That's what happens when you have local papers that don't pay enough for their reporters to actually live in or come from the places they report on (I speak as a former reporter at a local paper that was forever getting in trouble for getting the name of a particular street and a particular temple in our main town wrong).
Still, it's not like the big papers are much better. The Globe seems to have a map department based in Wyoming. Yesterday, they printed a map showing the route of that allegedly crazed tow-truck thief that had him driving on "Cumming Highway" - no mean feat given that there is no Cumming Highway in Boston (there is, however, a Cummins Highway). And it was great fun when the Globe printed a map showing West Roxbury right next to Roxbury.