#1 - N/A - We focus on Local Content. If you want to tie that to people, then we get that one. We’ll call a tie.

#2 - We have the average viewer go 3 pages deep, even more when bad weather happens. Another point.

#3 - We get that one too. Yup, we’ve got ads above the fold, but it sure as hell ain’t cluttered. We’re a friggin’ business, we have to make money, but we ain’t stoopid.

#4 - I’ll call it a wash. The sites navigation is pretty standard, but we’ve been relying on news pieces and promos to educate people about items on the site.

#5 - Another Wash/Tie. We are using a 3rd party company, but there’s enough flexibility for us to make things easy for users, but we could do more.

#6 - We didn’t design for the boss, but I’m not sure what that hippie statement of designing for the world means.. Tie.

#7 - I’ll say that we aren’t 100% there for tomorrow’s business, but we’re heading in the right direction, so no point there.

#8 - We keep out color scheme not too disruptive. Had plenty of conversations about this. Point us.

#9 - We made the concious decision to NOT put “Mount Rushmore” on the homepage masthead. Too valueable real estate to waste on faces people may not necessarily care about. Better used for newscast promotion or special projects. Point us

#10 - If I get my way, we’ll have that. But right now, we don’t get this point.

So final score is:

4-2-4. Four wins, 2 losses, and 4 ties. Not bad, but room for improvement.

Yes, most people ignore the ads on a news site, much like they ignore the ads everywhere else on the web and those which run during a broadcast. Lost Remote has an uncluttered design, but what’s the click-through rate on the ads? How many paid employees are they supporting and does it make enough profit to impress Wall Street?

Google makes most of their money from selling preferred listings. If I were shopping for bathroom tile and did a Google search, there will be several companies who have paid to be listed at the top and the bottom of the page. How would that translate to a news site? If I’m looking for info on the wildfire which raged yesterday on an area pueblo, would stories about other fires come up first because they paid for placement and who would pay to sponsor these headlines? Would a television station be able to demand such a premium for them to have only one or two ads per page, it would completely eradicate any loss from selling multiple ads at a lower cost?

If this is still 10% true I still offer they will implode at some point.

You all keep buying the wrong stock in my opinion.

Six or eight months ago, I was working on a project which required me to visit every network affilate’s website, grab their RSS feeds and bookmark them for future use.. Admittedly there were a handful who didn’t offer any news content or which only featured a couple of stories, the vast majority had news available on the web and though sometimes the catagorizations (part of that simplicity approach) meant that you had to drill for specifics, for the most part, the news was right there on the first screen.

Not to be a naysayer, but the idea of building community websites or a local hub is all well and good, but you don’t need to be a television station or a newspaper to achieve that goal. Right here on LR, we occasionally hear about a project from a husband and wife team in Seattle and in my small town of 10,000, there’s two local, unaffiliated “news sites” in addition to the two local papers and the Albuquerque media outlets, while Livejournal probably remains the best source for breaking news.

Personally and maybe it’s my own prejudice, but I don’t know that anybody should be taking a lot of advice from Google. They produce nothing and pretty much all they do is take other’s content and make that available. As a consumer, I turn to local media for news: news which they produce, but news, nonetheless. As long as it’s available in a timely fashion, so that if I see a headline about tornadoes in Virginia, I can quickly pull up stories from the Virginia Beach stations or if Obama had a press event in Winston-Salem, I can pull up the local paper, I personally feel that I’ve been served.

Simplicity, ease-of-use and a clean presentation is certainly the trendy buzz, but when I turn to local media, I want news and I really don’t want to look too hard for it, nor do I want to have to think a lot about the possible catagorizations for me to find it.

Please don’t get me wrong, I think in the abstract these are admirable goals, but where are all these “bad” sites and how many aren’t in the netherlands of the upper Midwest or in Appalachia?

It’s getting better, but this illustrates how far away local TV is on the web.

Oh, and the anchors like to see themselves on the masthead of the website. It’s a nice way to stroke their ego around the time they need to sign a new contract.

Like Ron Burgundy said, “I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That’s what kind of man I am. You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It’s science.”

Replace “man” with newsroom and “woman” with web producer. Its the same result.

…man, if I had a dollar…

Point #10 caught my eye. Google: 10. Add a human touch.
Is GOOG kidding? Can robots or algorithms kid?