1. Reader's deserve to know where they are - at a glance.2. Simple is OK. Simple and stupid is, well, stupid.3. Simple doesn't have to be ugly.4. Aesthetically appealing doesn't have to equal expensive.5. Customers (readers) rule.
At the risk of being obtuse: Current news Web sites, in general, don't listen very well. They really need to. Journalists get paid to listen well and report on what they hear. News Web sites can and should be listening to readers as well as reporting the news. The site that best learns to listen to its readers will rule.
After all, nobody else is listening. Not the telephone company. Not the gas company. Not the retail outlets. Heck. We could corner the market on listening. We would be so loved, and frequented for it.
The centralization that makes sense to me is using shared ad servers and common ad sizes/positions for national advertising; syndication servers for managing shared content; and pool web-reporting for national or regional news.
None of this requires massive, astonishingly overpriced, cookie-cutter systems like what Knight-Ridder built. The charges that some of the big media companies force on the local sites for this are truly jaw-dropping -- but you won't see that broken out in their press releases.
ANY efficent content management system would lead to significant staff-time savings, regardless of whether it's implemented locally or at the corporate level. Media companies would be much better off if they decided what really benefits from centralization, and giving broad autonomy to the local sites to operate within those guidelines. That leads to the innovation that online news so desperately needs, and reduces the absurd corporate cross-charges that are strangling local sites and eliminating creativity at some of the big chains.
Let's hope that a new guard like Hilary Schneider at Knight-Ridder Digital will move in this direction.
The "ugly" aspect is the real problem here. If the RealCities templates were clean and attractive, I don't think anyone would mind that the sites in all the other markets are sosimilar in appearance. This could even be construed as an advantage -- once you're familiar with one site, you can navigate any of the other sites in the network with the same ease.
There are unquestionably advantages to consolidating and standardizing certain aspects of site production, and similarly there are valid reasons to allow each individual site to retain control over theirown properties. It's a difficult to balance these two opposing directives; the incident in Fort Wayne where the local tech manager had to apologize to his readers for decisions forced upon them by Corporate in San Joe suggeststhat Knight Ridder hasn't yet found the sweet spot.
(full disclosure: I work for the "cookie cutter website" branch of Advance Publications. My opinions are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of my employers.)
