New Omaha.com?

The new Omaha.com is up! (Actually, up and down a few times, but it’s finding its feet.) Is it the same stuff with a new paint job? For us, the honeymoon ended when we discovered that: All of our old links to specific Omaha.com articles are officially broken. How nice. Those web-savvy OWH brass are back at it doing everything possible to drive away traffic. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. When we redo Omaha.com, let’s break every link to our site on the entire Internet!” Instead of taking the reader to the specific article, the new site redirects the broken link to the front page. I guess the concept of a permanent link has yet to arrive at OWH.

Call Me Electric Turquoise!

• First, overall impression: SLOW! And print content is old wine in a new bottle. The more minimalist look is an improvement, but the electric turquoise blue is a bit jarring. At least the new site looks minimalist when viewing in Firefox with Adblock on. When I temporarily disabled Adblock, I was treated to the same old prominent, blinking, circa 1990 ads and much slower loading times.
• The most promising new feature: The video and multimedia. Looks great, and wonder of wonders, they allow it to be embedded:

• Nice! Of course, this is the norm for other sites, but then so is being able to read the paper’s columnists online, which we still can’t do at Omaha.com, unless you have an extra 15 minutes to dink with the e-edition (see below). Anyway, I hope they have the racks to keep serving up the video. We’ll see the next time news breaks.
• I guess we are still being encouraged to use the clunky e-edition?

Omaha.com E-edition

• It’s prominently featured on almost every page, along with inducements to “Subscribe!” and “Buy today’s edition!” Do I need to see these if I’m already a logged-in subscriber? (Attn: Programmers have these really complex tools called if-then constructs. Hard to explain (not!) because it goes something like this: IF a print subscriber is logged in, THEN don’t show the “Subscribe!” and “Buy today’s edition!” messages.) Otherwise, site aside, the e-edition feels like the same pointless and unworkable e-edition of yore, complete with a “Server reset. Connection to the server was interrupted!” message and glacial loading times. No point in harping on bugs. We assume that they’ll be fixed. Content is the most pressing issue of the moment, and content appears unchanged, except for the great multimedia stuff. (We’ll explore the database journalism aspects at a later date.)
• It doesn’t say how far back we can search for articles, but early attempts do not look promising. The New York Times allows searches back to 1981. The Omaha World-Herald? Seven days. I guess it’s because Husker football articles are so much more valuable than that crap the New York Times runs. Supposedly it’s “powered by Microsoft’s Fast Search engine.” Wow. But, uhm, how fast does it need to be to search through seven days worth of articles and no columns?
• We now have a box featuring the most popular, most e-mailed, and hot topics, but again: No columnists, which are routinely the most popular and most e-mailed at other news sites.

Most Whatever Box

Are Mulligans Allowed In Politics?

Published a week ago.

Rumor has it that the new Omaha.com will debut Tuesday, June 2nd. Not a moment too soon. The old one annoyed us for nearly a decade, and the reports of a new site on the way have been around for years. We began to think it was like bigfoot or the unicorn: Oft-reported, ne’er seen.

Here’s a tip for the future: If you’re going to publish news online with an ancient, clunky, user-unfriendly site which is mostly a teaser for your print edition and goes down every time Bo Linguini announces a change in the Husker starting line-up, then call it WorldHerald.com. Don’t call it Omaha.com and tar the whole city for years with a site that looks like it was thrown up by a high school newspaper staff pulling an all-nighter.

Early reports from those in the know say that the new Omaha.com site is a thing of beauty. We’ll be the first to applaud, and the first to check and see if we can actually search the archives for articles we want to read.

And PLEASE knock it off with the teasers for the print edition. Charge us admission to the website if you have to, but quit those lame attempts to entice us to buy dead trees: “North Korea launches something . . . Is it a nuclear warhead aimed at Omaha? See Wednesday’s print edition for details.”

Print is dead. Get over it. We’re sorry that your former publisher built a gazillion-dollar, state-of-the-art printing press just in time for print to become extinct, but please stop asking us to pay for his gargantuan mistake.

Out with the old:

Omaha.com, the Internet Museum Version.

• Local Paper Making A Comeback In Tough Economic Climate
• Life After Newspapers