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How the hell do people use local news websites?
Using this website is bad enough with the constant 'bad gateway' and such errors, but try and use a local news website and sometimes there is about 1/10th of a screen of text visible.
I was just trying to read an article on Bristol24/7 and I had an advert covering the left side of the page which I couldn't close, a scrolling advert which kept moving the text up and down and then an advert which I couldn't find the close icon for. Finally I couldn't finish the article without subscribing.
Surely people just never use these sites?
How else can they generate the rage in readers which is their stock in trade?
I raised this question with the Yorkshire post and the digital editor responded almost I strangely to say it better if you subscribe.
Non merci.
They’re awful. Reach group own a lot of them and as far as I can see the business model is generating ad revenue with clicks. Often it will give me (in Rochdale) ‘local’ news from eg. Bristol, and low-quality shit-stirring, again with the aim of clicks.
The short answer to why it’s like this is that we don’t value local journalism; if you can, it’s worth looking at subscribing to your local equivalent of the Manchester Mill.
Reach group own a lot of them
Reach are in massive financial issues with declining ad revenue - forcing job cuts - which they've attempted to rectify with more ads.
More ads encourages ad-blockers, which leads to declining ad revenue etc.
It is unfortunate as local sports reporting, among other things, is being lost. In Stirling, local news is covered in remarkable detail by the local paper, but I refuse to buy a copy at £2 / wk, and it becomes click-bait by the time it reaches the Daily Record. Hey Ho.
Yeah local news teams like Bristol Cable and others are good for representing the local community, investigative reporting - but you really need to support them. If subscribing isn't an option even commenting / interacting/ sharing their posts on social media is valuable for them. I used to work in local papers and it's broken my heart seeing the way they were gobbled up by the big groups - as has been said, it's primarily about shit ads - most of the ones I know don't have a local reporter on the ground any more, just some poor bugger in the centralised office somewhere desperately SEO-ing the crap out of everything to try and hit their 'click' quotas to keep those sh*tty Taboola ads coming through. I could write 10,000 words on the decline of local news and what it's done to democracy, accountability and trust - but I'll spare you!
Universally terrible, I thought audience retention and keeping the user engaged by keeping them on the site to click through to other articles was an important metric, but if I ever click on a link to a news site I tend to try and skim read down to get the jist of the clickbait headline to determine if there is actually any truth whatsoever to article before bailing out and not getting caught out by dirty tricks such as 'next photo/article' arrow that are actually a link to a dating website.
Some of them don't even seem to have any content to the headline, you just scroll down 6 pages of ads before giving up!