E-Media Tidbits

Last week's nightclub fire in Rhode Island was, of course, a huge backyard story for the Providence Journal and its website. (Nearly 100 people died.) When a story of that magnitude breaks, it makes sense for a site like ProJo.com, which requires new visitors to the site to register before viewing content, to make some adjustments. On Friday, the day after the tragedy, ProJo.com visitors not already registered with the site had to go through the registration process. I'm not sure that makes sense when you have large numbers of brand-new visitors from outside your home area. These (in many cases) one-time visitors' registration data is worth less than regular, repeat Web readers. I'd suggest to news sites that require registration and find themselves in a similar situation that they turn off user registration temporarily -- or at least turn it off for stories about the big breaking story, but keep it on for the rest of the site.

Sheila Lennon, who writes the Subterranean Homepage News weblog for ProJo.com, notes that her blog has been outside of the site's registration all along. That's primarily so that the rest of the "blogosphere" can easily link to her stuff. With the nightclub story, the site did a fire weblog that was behind the registration wall over the weekend, but was removed from it on Monday. ProJo.com plans to have future breaking-news weblogs out from the registration wall. Lennon laments: "It has been troubling to see links going to national news outlets when the in-depth coverage is here." That's the down side to news site user registration.