I have always had a small problem with the online content for my hometown newspaper, The Mobile Press Register. It used to be that it was almost impossible to find anything online, even if you had seen an article in yesterday’s paper. Maybe about 5% of the content in the paper ended up online because the Press Register didn’t (and still doesn’t) have their own site. All online content of the Mobile Press Register is hosted by a larger site, Al.com which is also responsible for hosting The Birmingham News and the Huntsville Times.
Another small issue that I have had with the Press Register lately, they have increased their subscription rates drastically and diminished their newspaper page count drastically at the same time, so you pay more for the news to get less of it. As a poor college kid, that means that I no longer wish to get the print edtion and instead subscribe to the various RSS feeds offered by al.com.
I would imagine Al.com saves the three newspapers included a lot of money each year on their online endeavors, but I am not too sure that their readers are being served like they should be. Personally, if I wanted to get an assortment of news from the whole state I wouldn’t specifically seek out the Mobile Press Register or the Birmingham News, then I would go to a site like al.com.
When you go to al.com, unless you specify a location you are just given an assortment of news from the entire state. Today, for example, without scrolling down the page all of the links and information that I can see pertains to college football. There are, of course the links at the top of the page that will take you to “home,” “News,” “Weather,” “Sports,” “Entertainment,” “Travel,” “Interact,” “Jobs,” “Autos,” “Real Estate,” “Classifieds,” “Shop,” and “Place an ad.”
When I click on the Mobile version of the site, I still see the same thing except the weather in the right hand corner has changed to Mobile from Birmingham, but I still see the sports coverage and going further down the coverage is still statewide until you get to the very bottom of the page. I also feel that the home page is very cluttered with a lot of blue links that are just the titles of stories, unless it is the cover story there are no pictures on the home page to draw reader’s attention and the stories are not separated very well into categories or sections. I have no idea what I am looking at so it would be almost impossible to find something in particular unless I use the search bar. Graphically, there is a lot that the site is lacking, because there are no photographs and there aren’t any videos either, you have to go to a separate section to see a photo gallery and a video gallery.
There are lots of things about this site that I dislike, mainly because it isn’t exactly functional. I do like the interactivity that you can get from this site though. At the very bottom of the page there is a meter that ranks the stories that have been commented on the most by users, which I think is interesting. I like how they don’t just rank them by how many times they have been seen but by how many times someone has taken the time to post feedback. Users are also allowed to post photographs and video onto the site. It may have to be approved before posting, but I think that adds a great way for readers to connect to the news. Readers can write blogs, comment on blogs and posts and post their own photos and video, in fact al.com asks them to so that they can cover events that they don’t have enough reporters to cover, like high school sports. I also like how there are not a ton of ads everywhere, and the ads that are there are smaller than the ones that are seen on most sites. You could ignore the ads if you wanted to.
Overall, I don’t like al.com from the perspective of localized news because it isn’t. If I wanted news from one of the three areas covered by al.com, I would be better off turning to broadcast news sites instead of newspaper sites, which I find myself doing to get news out of Mobile.
