Here's a good example from a BBC article about Electric Vehicle subsidies:

There are around 1.3 million electric cars on Britain's roads but currently only around 82,000 public charging points.

Bloody hell! That's rubbish! Bring down the government! Woke nonsense!

OK, let's take a moment to contextualise those number.

There are about 34 million cars on the road. About 1.3 million cars are pure electric. So, about 32,680,000 dinosaur-juice cars.

How many petrol pumps do you think there are in the UK?

Have a guess.

Back in 2021, the BBC reported on the decline in petrol stations:

If this prediction is correct it is a death sentence for many of the 8,380 petrol stations in the UK.

Wait…! So there are 0.06 public chargers per EV, but only 0.0002 petrol stations per fossil fuel car?!!?

Lots of EV chargers will have multiple charging heads - allowing two or more vehicles to be charged at once. Similarly, petrol stations often have multiple pumps.

Let's assume that every EV charger can only do one car at a time, and every fuel station has 10 pumps. That's still a hell of a lot more chargers per EV than pumps per petrol car.

Of course, the elephant in the room is charging time. Electric Vehicle take much longer to recharge than a petrol car takes to refuel. As a rough average, an EV takes 30 minutes to get to 80% full. That will depend on the speed of the charger and the capacity of the battery. It takes maybe 10% of that time to fill a petrol car from empty to full.

But petrol cars always need to be refilled in public. Most EVs are recharged in private. Sat on a driveway or plugged into a lamp-post overnight, they start the day full. Given the average journey length of under 10 miles, the typical EV will never need to use public charger!

There are around a million home EV chargers installed. Around 2/3rds of home have access to off-street parking which would allow a private charger to be installed. That just doesn't happen with petrol. You can't install a petrol pump at home.

All of those EVs will start the day with the capacity to take 20 average trips before needing to recharge. If any of those trips end at a supermarket, work car park, or anywhere else with a charger, they'll start their next journey full.

Suppose that you do decide to drive >200 miles in a single journey. You should be taking a 15 minute break every 2 hours - but let's say you go for 4 hours, taking your car from full to empty. At which point, you probably need a piss and want to stretch your legs. Plug in at a service station, go to the loo, have an overpriced coffee and disappointing sandwich, walk back to the car and - oh look - it's practically full.

Does the country need more public chargers? Probably, yes. Are chargers all concentrated in wealthy suburbs or evenly distributed? Who knows. What are the current occupancy levels of public chargers? Those would all be excellent questions to research and publish.

Presenting context-free numbers doesn't help people understand the scale of the problem.

Frequently Made Comments

Please don't bother replying with any of the following:

peOpLe sHoUlD jUsT UsE publiC trANsporT

I agree.

wHAt ABoUt bAtTERY sWappiNg

Until every car has an identical chassis and battery, it isn't going to happen.

i liVe IN amErica And ALWAys dRive 700 MILeS pER dAy up fRozen MoUNTainS

We're talking about the UK. Most people don't have regular journeys like that.

i likE THE LOud NoISE MY eNgIne MAkes

Everyone else on the street hates you

For the last 3 years, The Times' articles have been (mostly) behind a paywall. People have been predicting its demise for just as long, but it shows no signs of going away - no matter how few people pay for content.

The overall thrust of The Times' argument is that they would rather have a low number of paying customers than a large number of freeloaders.

"What have we really lost? A long tail of passing trade, many from overseas, many popping in for only one article, referred by Google or a social media link, not even aware they are on a Times or a Sun website, wholly anonymous.

This reach doesn’t generate any meaningful revenue, and the pursuit of it undermines the piece of the business that does make money. If your purpose contemplates still being here in five to 10 years’ time, then the choice seems clear: it is better to sacrifice reach and preserve sustainable profitability."

News UK CEO Mike Darcey

Personally, I would like a large number of paying customers. But I'm old fashioned like that.

This leads me to the question - why does The Times make it so hard for me to give it money?

Here's a typical user journey.

"Oh! Hey! This looks like a pretty neat story that one of my Twitter friends has shared. Let's check it out!"

"Hmmm, I've been presented with a crappy desktop experience - despite being on a mobile. That doesn't happen with the Telegraph, FT, Guardian, Mirror, or Independent. They're smart enough to give me content formatted to my device."

"There's no link to view this story on mobile. I'll search for the mobile front page. I bet that's a good experience!"

"Still, running a image resizing proxy is pretty hard work. I'm glad I saw these error messages!"

"Ok, let's click on the story. I bet I can read the teaser content which has been available on the main site since 2012."

"No. Nothing. Oh well. Their reputation for hard hitting journalism means I certainly wish to subscribe."

"Wow! They really don't want my money. You know what, I'll try to get to their subscribe page on my phone anyway."

"Well, after searching the page for the smallest link imaginable, I've finally found something which looks like a mobile formatted page!"

"Finally! Take my money!"

What a load of rubbish! How is this a good way to take money from the billions of mobile users on the planet?

Here's how it should work....

1. User clicks a link from Twitter.
2. She sees a mobile friendly page, with teaser content, and a link to buy.
3. Buy link takes her to a mobile payment gateway.
4. User subscribes.
5. That's it.

Using a service like ImpulsePay The Times could create a link which charged their £2 access fee directly to the user's phone bill (if they were in the UK). It's true that there's a lack of global mobile payment options - but considering their payment page is already mobile friendly, they could just link directly to that.

It's all very confusing. They have a reasonable mobile payment system - they don't link to it. They can take advantage of direct mobile billing to the majority of users - they don't. They could provide a beautiful and compelling mobile experience to detected devices - they can't be bothered.

What's going on? Don't The Times like money?

Every so often, I spy something that reminds me just how far they need to go in order to fully "get" the web.

This latest example is from the Financial Times. I have huge admiration for the FT. Their reporting is usually spot on, their website is mostly excellent and their mobile site is very credible. But take a look at the bottom of this story.

See Page 2

Those words "Network Envy, Page 2 - BT Under Pressure, Page 16" aren't hyperlinks. They are just scraps of text telling me to turn to a separate page in my paper to read the story.

This tells us several interesting things about the FT.

• Their web and mobile content comes from the same back-end as their print content.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but...
• Their back end system has no understanding of the web (or the writer for this particular story doesn't understand it)
• There is no specific editor for the (mobile) web edition of the paper.  Allowing mistakes like this slip through shows a disregard for your readership.
• The mindset of the writers and editors aren't focused on the web.  This may be the tools they have at their disposal or it may be their training.  One thing is for certain - this is a print story which has been thrown with very little consideration on to a different medium.

Think what they could be doing.  The first mention of a company could be linked to all the news stories they have.  Given this is the FT, why not stick a live stock price after every company's name?  When a CEO is mentioned - link to their profile.

The power of hypertext is that it is so much better than regular text.  Not only more expressive, but more useful.  It can be dynamically generated and updated.  It can grant the joy of serendipidous discoveries to your readers.

Ignore the hype about blogs, comments, sharing, and twittering - it's links which make the difference.  Links are what drive the web and make it better than newsprint.  They connect your content - making it greater than the sum of its pieces.

It's your content - but better.

Insert a pound in the slot, press the button for The Times, aim your handheld's IrDA at the blinking light and ZAP! All the latest news for you to read on your train journey.

It's just as well that my idea never got out of the paper prototyping stage.  While BlueTooth has supplanted Infrared in the majority of modern phones, it is network provided data which is now king.

The Daily Show did a wonderful interview with the New York Times. The interviewer asked the editor...

Can you show me one thing in this paper that happened today?

And, of course, the answer is "no".

I remember on that dreadful day in September, barely a few hours had gone by before the first "extra" editions of the Evening Standard had pictures and analysis.

A few hours? That feels like a life-time. Especially when it comes to breaking and developing news.  There is a huge lag between a reporter typing away, the presses rolling, and the delivery drivers depositing the paper on the streets.

The Internet totally eliminates that lag.  A journalist can clatter words onto a laptop and with a push of a button have them broadcast to the world via their website.

The Web is Too Slow

I simply can't wait until I'm back at my desk. Nor can I be bothered to boot my laptop, find some Wifi, find some power, load FireFox, etc...

Flip open my phone, click news, read. That's what I want. And that's what I can get.  For breaking news, the mobile Internet is the only real solution.

What's Available

I present here a quick overview of the most popular British Newspapers' mobile sites.  I've also included the New York Times for international flavour and Reuters for the agency view.

List of mobile newspapers - spot the favicon

I don't intend to comment on the politics of the papers, nor their choice of stories  - I'm going to concentrate on the first impression only. Later I'll do a full review of their capabilities.

The first thing to spot is the use of the Favicon. Favicons are the little icons which are used to differentiate your site from others. Think of it like a visual bookmark.  Bizarrely, half of the UK papers don't use a Favicon.  That means that in the bookmarks list they are likely to be overlooked.

A special mention for Reuters' Favicon (highlighted) - It's an indistinct yellow splodge.  I've highlighted it because it's hard to see yellow against a grey background.

FT.com - http://m.ft.com/🔗

m.FT.com

Traditionally printed on pink paper, the mobile site seeks to replicate the distinctive hue of its paper counter part.  From a branding perspective, this instantly tells the user that they are on familiar ground.  It doesn't affect the readability - so why not.

Showing the time next to a story instantly tells the reader how "fresh" the content is.  Confusingly, there's no date displayed.

Search is always important to readers; allowing them to get straight to the content they want.  Not having any navigation is a hindrance to users quickly finding their way around.  While users will scroll to get to navigation - placing it at the top is an easy way to let them choose where to go next.

While advertising is a necessary evil, this advert is hard to read and jars with the rest of the page.  The layout of the whole page seems very heavy on the dead-space.

Guardian - http://m.guardian.co.uk/🔗

m.Guardian.co.uk

I've already reviewed the Guardian - but to my mind it still stands out as one of the best examples of mobile news sites.  Compact and efficient layout, navigation, teaser images, and the date all contribute to a well designed first impression.

The Independent - http://m.independent.co.uk/🔗

m.independent.co.uk

Dispensing with navigation has allowed The Independent to cram a few more stories above the fold.  Although their teaser text hasn't been optimised for the size of the screen leaving some rather jarring dead-space.

The colouring is rather plain, but fits in well with the paper's brand.  Colouring the background space given over to the advert is an interesting design choice.  It simultaneously draws attention to the advert while keeping it conceptually separate from the rest of the site.

Metro - http://metro.mobi/🔗

metro.mobi

The Metro is technically a newspaper.  The mobile site reflects the paper version - cheap, cheerful, primary colours and a blonde on the front page.  The total dominance of the image detracts from the rather good navigation choices - split by category.  The masthead is perhaps a bit large - but the promise of the image will probably be enough to get 50% of the population to scroll down.

It's interesting to notice that there are no stories or direct links to stories to be seen.

New York Times - http://mobile.nytimes.com/🔗

mobile.nytimes.com

They "Gray Lady" lives up to its reputation with a very plain site which, nevertheless, packs in a lot of information.

Using an anchor link to get to the navigation is a smart choice.  It reduces clutter at the top while keeping navigation options available.  With intelligent use of space they've also crammed in a search box.  The date and time give the viewer the reassurance that the news they are reading is not stale.

Unlike the other sites, the NYT places images on right.  While this is distinctive, readers of English are accustomed to a flow of information from left to right.  I wonder if this style helps or hinders readability.

The link to a dedicated application is a smart touch and will probably upsell readers.  Unfortunatley it comes at the expense of looking like it is part of the headline.   A less subtle change of font, colour, or placement would help here.

Reuters - http://uk.mobile.reuters.com/mobile/uk/🔗

uk.mobile.reuters.com

Reuters is not a newspaper. It is austere and feature poor. Deliberately so - it caters to those who want the news without any fuss. That said, they do make poor use of the space available; only the lower third contains any real content.  It makes a nice change not to have an advert at the very top of the page - but the heaps of space aren't really necessary.

Shifting the masthead and date on to one line, then removing some extraneous space would provide a better first impression by bringing more news to the forefront.

The Sun - http://thesun.mobi/🔗

thesun.mobi

The Sun is Britain's biggest selling paper.  Unlike the others, they totally eschew advertising at the top of their site.

The page is strongly branded and very picture heavy - that's likely to negatively impact download times. Navigation is very clear but it is missing search. They have deliberately taken the paper's style - the ripped edges of the image, for example - and applied it directly to the mobile.  That's not always a great idea, but it certainly makes it stand out from the crowd.

Times - http://timesmobile.mobi/🔗

timesmobile.mobi

I've reviewed the Time before.  I find the logo unnecessarily large.  It's great that they've got the date and time on there - but giving them their own line feels like an inefficient use of space.

Essentially, over half the screen is wasted here.

Mirror - http://m.mirror.co.uk/🔗

m.mirror.co.uk

The Mirror's mobile site feels dominated by its advert - yet, impressively, they still manage to keep 3 stories above the fold.

There's no navigation or search.  Indeed, it's as simple as you can be without the barren space typified by Reuters.

While offering a good amount of news - this really gives the impression of being Lidl's site, with a bit of news thrown in.  Adverts should be carefully designed not to swamp the pages on which they live.

Telegraph - http://m.telegraph.co.uk/🔗

m.telegraph.co.uk

Alphabetically last, The Telegraph is a rather mixed bunch.  The only images are an advert and its logo.  The navigation and use of date are well integrated. Despite this, they can only fit two stories above the fold.

There are no images to entice the user - although the text rich screen does convey a depth of purpose that the others may be missing.

Conclusion

It's important to remember that users will scroll. The idea of putting important assets "above the fold" is, at best, a distraction. But there's no denying that the first impression really does count.

It's heartening to know that the UK's mobile (mainstream) news market is so vibrant and healthy. While they differ in functionality and content - these sites show that providing news on the mobile is no longer a niche activity.

Mobile news sites come in a wide range of shapes and sizes - demonstrating that mobile needn't be static and simplified.

These sites - despite their problems - are evidence that mobile news, for many people, is the news.

Regardless of the sanity or effectiveness of this idea - I thought it would be an interesting idea to turn the tables. What would it be like if News International were unable to scour the web for stories to rip off, comments to plunder and images to steal?

Turns out, it's rather simple.  News International owns a rather large swathe of IP addresses.

% Information related to '143.252.0.0 - 143.252.255.255'
inetnum:         143.252.0.0 - 143.252.255.255
remarks:         **** INFORMATION FROM ARIN OBJECT ****
remarks:         netname: NEWS-INT-UK
descr:           News International
descr:           PO Box 481
descr:           1 Virginia Street
descr:           London E1 9BD
remarks:         country: GB
admin-c:         MF2311-RIPE
tech-c:          MF2311-RIPE
remarks:         changed: hostmaster@arin.net 19901026
remarks:         changed: hostmaster@arin.net 19950103
remarks:         **** INFORMATION FROM RIPE OBJECT ****
netname:         NEWS-INT-UK
descr:           Times Supplements Limited
country:         GB
admin-c:         TE960-RIPE
tech-c:          IR135-RIPE
remarks:         rev-srv:        ns0.newsint.co.uk ns1.newsint.co.uk

All this means that any connection originating from 143.252.*.* comes from News International.

You can add IP addresses to your .htaccess file which will simply deny them access to your site.  You could redirect them to a PayPal site demanding payment.  You could write a bit of JavaScript to shower them in annoying pop-ups.

Or you could treat them no differently from any other Internet Citizen.  The choice is yours.

Disclaimer: I'm not sure what other IP addresses they may own, and this doesn't cover anyone connecting from home, via a dongle or other mobile device.

angusprune@mastodon.lol 🫡

@angusprune

Let's Make It Happen

So, assuming each story has a URL, how would that look http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/22/post-national-strike-begins

Turning it into a QR code using my encoder...

The URL in QR form

That's probably a bit large for a paper - you could shrink it down or cut down on the error rate, but then it would be hard to scan.

Luckily the Guardian redirects mobile phone browsers to their mobile site - rather than trying to cram the whole page on to a tiny screen - so there only needs to be one code per story.

Assuming that the Guardian's CMS works in a vaugely sensible way, each story has an ID. So the URL could be http://guardian.co.uk/?p=123456789

So, using a shorter URL gives us...

Better?

If they were to use a custom short-url service - guardi.an for example - the code becomes even smaller.

Could this be printed near every important story?  I see they have links within the paper than you have to manually type in - could this be a way to connect the online and offline versions of the paper?

The Telegraph has a brief piece on why they don't use URLs in their paper.

The Guardian's Saturday edition strikes me as a long form version of Private Eye, but written by those who would never use a sentence where a paragraph would suffice.  Full of long rambling articles about the truly trivial and incomprehensible.

After the Guardian's excellent reporting on Trafigura, I decided to help their coffers and circulation figures by purchasing a copy of their paper - breaking ten years of abstinence from paper-based news.  As I've reviewed their website, I thought I'd review their paper from the point of view of one who is deeply familiar with online media but unfamiliar with print.

What A Lot Of Paper

Background

In 1998 I bought my last newspaper.  My parents always had newspapers at the weekend and - due to a stock of vouchers given away in Freshers' Week - I assumed I'd follow in their footsteps.  In halls I was one of the lucky few with a permanent Internet connection.  Every morning started with a scan of http://news.bbc.co.uk/, a browse through USENET and one or two international newspapers' nascent websites.  I haven't bought a paper since.

Nowadays upon waking, my Blackberry has already downloaded the headlines from the BBC, Guardian and a hundred different news sources all, seemingly, for free.  Why would I buy a newspaper?

The Paper

The first thing that struck me was the user interface.  Actually, scratch that, the first thing that struck me was the price. £1.90! Nearly two quid.  For someone unaccustomed to paying for news, that's quite a tall order.  I gather that the weekly paper is "only" £1 an issue.  For £1.90 I was expecting quite a lot.  I don't think I found value for money.

User Interface

So, the user interface.  I remember a kerfuffle a while ago about the Guardian moving to a Berliner format. Supposedly easier to hold and read.  Utter nonsense. To even try to read this paper on a commuter train would be a recipe for disaster. Huge unwieldy pages and, to add insult to injury, no staple in the middle!  Even though I was placidly sitting on my sofa, pages kept falling out!  Perhaps reading a newspaper is a skill that has atrophied in me - but having to continually shift my grasp on the sheets was a chore.  A simple staple through the middle would make for a much more pleasant reading experience.

One good thing though.  The linear nature of the paper meant that I was forced to read stories I would otherwise have skipped were I on the web.  A newspaper is presented like a book; you read each page in turn.  You're perfectly free to skip over a story - but I found myself reading at least the first paragraph of each story.  On the web, I pick and choose. I never have to read a story about childcare, sport, Scottish politics etc.  It was refreshing to get a wider view than my usual self-selected reading.

Adverts

Naively, I thought that there wouldn't be much advertising.  We're continually told that there has been a collapse in the advertising market. I assumed my couple of quid would pay for the majority of this paper.  There was advertising on nearly every page. Some pages had nothing but advertising!

What struck me was the sheer randomness of the adverts.  When reading an article about the Lost City of Atlantis online, I'd expect to see adverts for cheap holidays to Greece, SCUBA gear - maybe even a computer game.  In the paper, it's Abbey mortgages and Moben kitchens.  The adverts are randomly placed, unrelated to the text and somehow, highly intrusive.  One section of the magazine has a full page advert disguised to look like a normal article.  Yes, it says "Advertising Feature" at the top of he page - but it's otherwise presented as another piece of journalism.

It is even bundled with separate advertising sections. Little leaflets drip out of every page littering the floor.  They're the equivalent of pop-up ads and just as annoying.

Reviews

There seem to be three separate sections which do reviews.  The main paper reviews classical music, theatre and TV, the Guide does games, clubs, websites, theatre and television. Then there's a whole section called "Review"!.  Why split over three different bits?  Why are some reviews barely a paragraph and yet others are A-Level essays pontificating on the deeper meaning of art.

Blogs

There are some articles which, to my eye, are little more than blog posts.  Nick Duerden writes about taking his daughter to see Disney Princesses on Ice. Apparently girls like sparkly things.  Who knew?

David Hare has also written an interminable essays in the magazine.  While I'm sure that it's of great interest and importance for his readers, I resent having paid for such... Well.. flotsam.

These articles are not news - they're just blog entries.  Only, for some reason, I'm expected to pay for their ramblings.  There are plenty of better written and more interesting articles being posted every day on blogs round the world.  I suspect that's the idea behind The Blog Paper.  I'm as guilty as anyone of writing self indulgent tosh on my blog.  Entries which are of no interest to anyone other than me.  But I don't expect anyone to pay for them.  I don't bundle my writing in with my work.  "Hey, boss, I'll finish that report you're paying me for - and I'll throw in an essay about how my wife doesn't understand me!"

What it really highlights is that opinion pieces aren't news.  They're not even journalism except in the most litteral sense of the word.  They are barely a step about "Have Your Say" sections of news websites.  Indeed, the Guardian's own Comment is Free section shows that anyone can write a similar article.  Tellingly, the comments in CiF show the utter contempt most readers have for opinion pieces.

Sport

I hate sport.  One reason why I am usually loath to buy a paper is massive sport sections. I was feeling guilty about buying the Guardian only to recycle the sports section unread.  Evidentially, Guardian readers, like me, were last to be picked at PE. The sports pages are mercifully short (16 pages) and fitted neatly into my recycling bin.

Etc.

What A Jumble

There's just so much that's confusing about the Guardian in paper form.  So many different, overlapping sections.  Different shapes, sizes, grades of paper.  Long rambling articles, tightly focused analysis, full page pictures, full page adverts, a list of every comedy club in Britain, a review of an obscure restaurant in the middle of nowhere.  Don't get me started on the pathetic "Free Gift" which is meant to entice me like a child to a bland breakfast cereal,

What does the Guardian want to be?  Is it news? Is it "lifestyle"? Is it review? Is it academic essays? Is it everything jammed into one ill-fitting format because "That's what newspapers are"?

It's a format that in incomprehensible to anyone under the age of 30.  It's an insular little work with only one page given over to readers' comments.

Demographics

My moaning comes down to a question of demographics.  There is only one slice of the population which matters. Me.  No one else.  It's hideously ego-centric to think this way but I do. Why can't I buy the Guardian without the sports section? With an expanded technology section? Charlie Brooker on the front page and David Hare banished from view?

Well, on the web, I can.  This paper in physical form has to please everybody. An unenviable job and one I suspect is impossible.

My Conclusion

Love The Guardian - Hate The Paper.

I'm sure I'm depressingly close to their target audience - but whole swathes of the paper are lost on me.  I love reading the Guardian's news online and on my mobile.  So why do I hate the paper version so much?

The web allows us to see how many people click on each story. See who reads, how long they read for, what they read next, where they came from and where they go to.  I suspect if you were to put the newspaper fully online, it would become clear that some sections of the paper survive through inertia alone.  Can anyone really be interested in Mark Lawson blethering on about people who don't speak like what they ought to? Or Lucy Mangan's meanderings on "Are You There God? It's Me, Margret"?  They are there to fill space.  Their sole purpose is to reaquaint me with the joke behind Polly Filler and her ilk.

Anyone who has read Flat Earth News cannot fail to recognise that the newspaper industry is in crisis. Journalists are too stretched, deadlines are too tight and money is in short supply.  How can newspapers be saved?

Well, there are easy solutions. Stop writing articles for space filling reasons. Retrain the "journalist" who wrote about celebrity trends in the "noughties" and get them to write about news. Recognise that - if you're committed to a finite space resource like paper - you have to trim the fat, not the meat.  A review of a book does not need to be a undergraduate essay on the author and contain a huge photo of her and her dogs. By contrast, a review of a computer game, club, or bar needs to be more than a puff-piece paragraph.  See what your readers want - make a paper that they can use.

Is an article on Russia taking state control of all TV channels really worth a tenth of the space as an article by Alan Rusbridger where he tells us that Google, Wikipedia, Twitter and Comment is Free are pretty cool?

Above all, kill the quaint.  Tradition is no more than monkey folklore.

What reading The Guardian in paper form has taught me is that the web allows me to easily ignore the turgid or vapid - paper is less forgiving.

But there, of course, I've argued against the existance of Private Eye's hidden gems.  Perhaps someone, somewhere is desperate for an obituary of David Troostwyk and I am an ignorant philistine.

I will continue to read the Guardian; but I won't be buying it again.  While its journalism and newsgathering are excellent, for £1.90 I expect not to have to throw half of it away, unread and unloved.

Discovery

The first I knew of the site was this advert nestled away on their website.

No mention of the URL on the advert

The URL is the rather tautological http://timesmobile.mobi/

Good: Using a .mobi to indicate it is a mobile friendly site Bad: Not autodetecting my phone and redirecting me to the .mobi site.

Page Layout

A nice clean front page.

The Times - Mobile Front Page

The logos are, to my mind, too large - they dominate the page whereas they should be subtle enough to be useful.  The adverts predominantly for The Times' own services.

Big Images

Stories are well laid out, although the images could be shrunk for a mobile audience.

Stories are split over several pages - helps with download speeds and also boosts page impressions.

Next and Previous page links

Sharing

Unbelievably, there's no way to share stories. There's no send to a friend link and, worst still, the URLs are too long to send in an SMS. I also suspect they contain session keys.

What a long URL

Compare this to The Guardian...

At the bottom of each Guardian story

Text to a friend

...or the New York Times...

The New York Times has a range of sharing option

Send to a friend

How do you expect to build readership if your current readers can't tell their friends about your great content?

Customisation

This is one area where The Times outshines the competition. At the bottom of the front page is the invitation to customise the page.

Customise

This is a boon for people like me with no interest in sports. Here are my customisations...

All the different sections

...And the resultant section on the front page.

My Front Page

Search

The Times' search functionality is curious.  The input field is too narrow and the buttons are poorly placed.

Wherefore art thou, Shakespeare (yes, I know wherefore means why)

It also provides mobile friendly web searches - although the order seems rather spurious.

Random mobile results

Feedback

The site asks for feedback - curiously, they don't link to their mobile Twitter page. Again, their text fields are far too narrow.

Why does The Times hate hyperlinks?

RSS

They seem to offer mobile friendly RSS feeds, a great way for keeping people up to date with the site.

Mobile friendly RSS

Yet, for some reason, the link isn't clickable.

Conclusion

This has some awesome features - I love the customisable homepage, especially the keyword search.

There are some minor UI niggles which will no doubt be ironed out over time.

The lack of sharing is a severe mistake - without an easy way to send stories to people, you can't hope to organically drive traffic.

I look forward to more British news sites going mobile.

Post Script

The Times wish it to be known that...

we were mobile-friendly long before Guardian

Extract from The Times

The Guardian wrote about my experiences with energy monitors.

Extract from The Guardian

What struck me was the very different ways that these "Old Media" approached the "New Media" of the web.

I'll state my biases up front. I'm a tofu knitting, bleeding heart liberal who - if I were one of the dwindling number of newspaper buyers - would read The Guardian or the Independent. I also owe Kevin Anderson a beer. The Times has given me some free T-Shirts and its sister paper, The Sun, covered my wedding.

Let's see how the two compare...

Hyperlinks

The web relies on links. Hyperlinks are what separate the web from classical text.

The Guardian is extremely generous with linking.  Every name, every article, every unfamilar idea is meticulously cross-referenced. The Times has none. No links within the text. Even when the author writes out aitch-tee-tee-pee - still no link. They could link my name, link to my original twitter post, link to their own content - but they choose not to. This is obviously a newspaper article - designed to be read on paper. Perhaps my secretary is meant to type in the hyperlinks, print out the resultant pages and then fax them to me.

This is how The Times should have displayed the tweets

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Once upon a time there was a beautiful Princess. Something morally relevant happened. Then Disney fucked it up to sell toys. The End #TCTC

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Guardian 1 : Times 0

Tagging

A folksonomy is an excellent way to categorise content. It's a simple and effective way to help your readers find your content. The Guardian offers several ways to see similar stories. It make effective use of tags as well as sidebar content. The Times has a few links at the side - but doesn't provide any contextual information.

Guardian 2: Times 0

Mobile

Like several billion other people around the world, I access the web via my mobile. What happens when I visit these sites using my phone's default browser?

The Guardian redirects me to the correct story on m.guardian and provides a pleasant mobile experience. There are a few problems with the speed at which articles are put on the mobile site - but it works.  The hyperlinks and images are sorely lacking - but at least it is a clear and easy to use experience.

Mobile Friendly - but feature poor

The Times doesn't have a mobile version. Or rather, it may do but didn't redirect me there. As a result I get a fairly messy page and a large bill for downloading heaps of data.

Mobile Unfriendly

Guardian 3 : Times 0

Paying

The Times, it would appear, wants to charge me for access to its websites. Based on the above, I find it hard to get excited about the idea of paying for such poorly executed delivery. The Guardian will let me freely remix its content via its APIs. It encourages free creation.

Guardian 4 : Times 0

Commenting

Both sites let me comment.  This is a great way to get feedback from your readers.  It also allows you to see where you may have erred in your original story.

The Times allows you to comment on any story - The Guardian seems to restrict comments to blog posts.

Both sites require registration - something I've always found a bid needless - but The Times has a single form whereas The Guardian's form seems to span several pages.  Make registration easy enough to encourage commentators - not put them off.

Guardian 4 : Times 1

Conclusion

The Guardian is the clear leader, but both sites have something to learn from the other.  Both are a long way from being perfect.  Journalists and editors need to understand all of the benefits of the web and make sure that they are making the best use of them.

You wouldn't use colour printing to display black and white photographs in your printed paper - nor would you make links unclickable on the web.

Once they make these changes to their mindsets - both will be in a strong position to take full advantage of this "new" media.