It is a pity that the only newspaper I trust (and read) in India, The Hindu, is notoriously difficult to consume in any but the most ancient format. Being made available in digital media is not an empty trend and need not divert from good journalism. It also need not — and should not — be second to it. And as our style of news consumption evolves, it will (as sad as this truth may be) take more than good journalism to stay relavant.
In this age the news and the medium we consume it in go hand-in-hand, and this fine newspaper seems to be letting things slip. Take The New York Times for example, coming from another old news house — over a quarter of a century older than The Hindu — which has arguably the best digital presence today. And it’s journalistic standards have not dropped in making a move from broadsheet to phones, tablets and PCs. It is, after all, the 21st century, and The Hindu must buck up.
1.
The Hindu was the first newspaper in India to offer a website to its readers, back in 1995. Unfortunately, its website still looks like it belongs in 1995. A low–resolution logo (see below) crowns the page and right next to it is an image sprite1 containing an inconspicuous link to The Hindu mobile app. Sprites are a thing from around 2003 but fast servers and caching can do the trick just fine in 2015. Looking deeper into their websites (Business Line, for example) reveals almost all assets are low–resolution.
The website is rather lazily plastered all over with Open Sans typography, an antithesis to The New York Times or The Guardian or The New Yorker‘s carefully chosen type and layouts. The site, on the whole, is messy and hard to map out and read. One might argue that it is the content that counts, but on the web, type, layout and other design standards do matter a lot.
Further, The Hindu‘s website is kludgy and seems completely lost when it comes to responsive design — a buzzword on the web last year, and an element incorporated into every major website now. Two other publications I read, The Guardian and The New Yorker (one of my three weekend reads) both have beautifully responsive websites which scale down and reform to device dimensions. This, for instance, is what they all look like on my Mac:
Responsiveness (or the lack of it) in The Hindu‘s website, compared to the websites of two other publications I read regularly.
The family–owned newspaper’s most modern foray came a couple of weeks ago in the form of thREAD (or THread — even The Hindu is unsure how exactly it is stylised) an interesting collection of blogs written (from what I gathered) by its journalists. The problem with the site itself is (it appears) that since it was re–designed back in 2009 by Garcia Media, it has remained untouched. Websites, as it happens, are not things you build once and forget about. They need constant care and updating, both in terms of infrastructure and outward design.
2.
The Hindu stands for appreciable causes and carries some of the finest examples of journalism, consistently. Any tech–savvy reader would find themselves between a rock and a hard place as they cannot leave The Hindu for a better national newspaper — there simply isn’t one — and they cannot consume the news digitally either — the experience is unpleasant, to say the least.
Feeds are a common way of reading the news. (RSS is not dead.) Sourced from websites and blogs, these pick up newly published articles and aggregate them into a single reading list allowing us to keep up with multiple publications with ease.2
Small things matter — THread on the Instagram, advertised as thREAD in this welcome image shows some inconsistency in branding.
The Hindu unhelpfully truncates its RSS feed making it unnecessarily difficult to read, forcing you to visit their website over and over again for each article. And when in the company of those who provide a lavish, full article feed, (which is every single other website on my RSS feed list) The Hindu simply comes off as an annoying little kid trying to draw attention to itself.
My fellow blogger and writer, Kim Werker, wrote an interesting article a while back about why publications and blogs should not truncate their RSS feeds. She rightly argues that truncating feeds will drive readers away, while doing nothing whatsoever to prevent content scraping. That is to say, it is a game of loss–loss however you look at it.
“(Content scraping) may seem like a very logical and sound argument for truncating your RSS feed and thus limiting the ability of other people and spammers to steal your work … here’s the other side of the argument: Like DRM, which severely and inappropriately limits the ways a reader who legitimately buys an ebook can actually read it, truncated feeds alienate the honest people who want to consume your content … I’m not stumbling onto your blog by happenstance after a Google search. I’m the reader you want.
“… five people who find your (website) through word of mouth will be more likely to stay … than fifteen people who whiz by on their hunt (from Google).”
— Kim Werker
Let us assume, for the moment, that The Hindu does not truncate their feeds for this purpose, but rather for the sake of their advertisement–based business model online. If that is indeed the case, I would be more than happy to pay for the newspaper’s digital edition annually (as would others, I’m sure.) After all I already subscribe to the print edition and hardly read it; since I consume the news digitally, I would willingly put the same subscription money towards a digital subscription.3
The Next Web has a wonderful model for this very purpose. Last year the tech website rolled out three separate RSS feeds — one for regular readers (truncated, with links to their website, with ads), one for paid subscribers (full feed, without ads), and one for services like Flipboard (full feed, without ads). The consistent theme in this argument is that content thieves will steal your content no matter what you do, so you might as well make it easy for faithful readers to read your publication.
The entire feed coming in from The Hindu is another garbled mess. There is no prioritisation of articles. Most readers do not care of every single news item published — that would be pointless, because for a reader who has a day job, reading news is, like a lot of other things, based on priority. The Hindu should have (in addition to its existing national news, features, opinions, city etc) a daily summary fed via RSS to its subscribers. Parenthetically, there is another glaring omission: there is no RSS feed for its Today’s news section.
3.
One look at the maladroit legal notice4 on the newspaper’s RSS feeds page makes their intention clear: they do not want content scraping. But the crude fact is, content scraping bots are probably already copying articles from their website. Their RSS subscribers are innocent; readers looking for good journalism and finding it terribly hard to lay their hands on. If The Hindu was as bad as certain other Indian newspapers which I will not name, I would have unsubscribed with my eyes closed. Unfortunately (in this one case) the newspaper is top–notch and unsubscribing, at this moment, is not an option for me.
In any case, this is probably why The Hindu has a paid e–paper. It deems that a faithful rendition of their print edition serves the digital reader best.5 This e–paper is not to be confused with an electronic paper display (which is what e–paper normally means, like on a Kindle). However, e–papers are simply unnecessary: reading on a screen something that looks like a real newspaper is no different from reading handpicked articles straight from a website.
No commas, no quotation marks? Looks like someone has given up on grammar.
The mobile app on iOS is not pretty either. Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus released more than a year ago and I’ve carried it in my pocket ever since. The Hindu has updated its app seven times this year and the first one (version 2.0, on 26th January 2015) claimed that users of “iPhone 5 and above versions will be able to fully experience the Optimisations carried out”. Ten months later the app still runs like a blown up version of iPhone 5 on high–resolution devices. Then the 6S Plus came out and the app now lags something like three iterations behind the very device it is supposed to serve. I sometimes wonder if anybody at The Hindu has downloaded and used their own iOS app or, if they have, I wonder what excuse they have to let it lie in its current sorry state.
A lot of UI elements seem out of place on the 6 Plus (and now the 6S Plus as well), like the status bar and the share sheet; the spacing is inconsistent between the article and the headline, and a well thought–out design language (which is an extremely important part of any app — and more so of a text–heavy app) is non–existent: it still uses old blue underlined links replicating a website from the 80s and 90s. On the plus side, there were pieces of unparsed code mixed in with the articles months before, but that has since been corrected; in addition, thREAD has also been added to the app almost immediately after the blog collection was started, so the app has by no means been abandoned; but then it does not seem like it is being carefully tended for either.
The debate as to whether full RSS feeds are as good as having a reader’s e–mail on record (such as when they subscribe to the digital edition of a newspaper) can go on forever. However, TNW‘s model is as good as you can get in this regard: allow for a digital subscription, provide a full RSS feed. The e–papers provided are no better than browsing the web; the app (on iOS at least, since I cannot speak for Android) is discouraging to use. Especially when you switch from the BBC‘s or The Guardian’s app, The Hindu looks like it came out of the palaeolithic era.
Journalists are fickle creatures. I know because I was one of them. You will almost literally have to smack one around the head before they pay any attention to you. With a few wonderful exceptions, journalists have no real clue what is good and what is bad in the world of technology.
— Chris Stevens, in “Designing for the iPad”
It is true that content is king and The Hindu has invaluable content. But it is difficult to read with an awkward advertisement stuffing itself before your face. It is also equally hard to read with a terrible typeface. A cluttered app and an RSS feed that defeats its own purpose by constantly and repeatedly making you visit the website you hoped to avoid in the first place are also not helpful at all. An e–paper that makes it like reading the same website, albeit looking different, is more about form than function. To one type of digital reader, an app is convenience and the newspaper’s app needs a lot of work; to the other type of digital reader6 the RSS feed is convenience and the newspaper’s feed needs a complete re–think.
The problem with The Hindu right now is pretty clear: there is a lot of function, and no form. Just because you do not acknowledge something, it does not mean that thing does not exist. How much ever the newspaper tries to look away from design and form, the fact is that they matter, and to a considerable extant form is function. The newspaper has excellent journalism; how much better would it be, and how longer a stride for them, if the content was presented as well as it deserved to be?
The Hindu‘s substandard digital presence stands in stark contrast to its excellent journalism and this is not so much from a lack of trying as a lack of execution. They have attempted to put our their journalism in various media and keep up with the times, but almost every attempt has ended up being rather unsightly.
My intention is not to compare The Hindu with other news houses — to each their own — but there is a certain growth on the web that simply cannot be overlooked. Indeed, look no further than The Hindu‘s own designer, Garcia Media, for a reason why their web presence needs to be worked on by priority: good design stimulates the brain. It can only be positive if the newspaper paid a little — or a lot — more attention to their digital presence. It’s the 21st century after all.
- see it on http://www.thehindu.com/template/1-0-1/gfx/social_sprite.png ↩
- For the curious, I use an app called Unread which is available separately on iPhone and iPad. I reviewed the iPhone version a while back and was extremely pleased with it. ↩
- By digital subscription I do not mean their e–Paper offering, which is part of a paid subscription — we will talk about that in a moment. ↩
- The NY Times too has a legal notice, an even longer one, but it has elegantly been separated from the main feeds list. ↩
- This could not be farther from the truth: a digital reader needs convenience, brought on by good design and easy access to content, not skeuomorphism. ↩
- The first is the type of lightweight news consumer who sticks to one or two news apps. The second is one who aggregates content from multiple sources, which makes lugging around multiple apps cumbersome and therefore aggregation becomes an attractive solution. I myself fall into the latter category. ↩
The post Dear The Hindu, it’s the 21st century appeared first on V.H. Belvadi.