After teasing about it for a few weeks, MetroNorth Newspapers has released an updated website.  The new site consolidates the MetroNorth Newspapers site with the Mile High Newspapers site, all owned and published by Scott Perriman.  This essentially puts all eight news properties including the Northglenn-Thornton Sentinel under one roof on the Internet at great8newspapers.com. 

I have written before about the lack of a real online news outlet for truly local news.  As was said, the Denver area TV media and the Denver Post pretty much ignore everything north of I-76 and a better solution was needed for the hundreds of thousands of residents in the north area. 

Is the new Great8Newspapers.com the answer?  The answer is a bit of a mixed bag in our opinion with an overall grade of ‘incomplete’ given. 

Consolidating all of the papers in a single location is a great idea.  What happens in Thornton can affect Westminster and surrounding communities and vice versa so it is nice to get all the news for the entire area in one place. 

The problem as we see it is the execution.  Some quick hitting thoughts:

• The domain name great8newspapers.com is not a good choice at all.  It conveys no meaning as to what the ‘great 8’ are and it is long and hard to type.  The publisher already owns “MileHighNews.com” and it would be an extraordinary domain name to use.  It provides a local context, is relatively short and has meaning not only to locals but to outsiders.  Everyone knows Denver as the Mile High City. 
• The color scheme…  Green and blue?  Yuck!  I wish they would have stuck with the color scheme of the old MileHighNews.com website.  If using green, at least make it more of a ‘forest green’ than a bright, blinding one. 
• For that matter, the old MileHighNews.com site was overall a better design and should have been the one that they based the new one on.
• Dump the ‘translation’ box.  Wasted space and I don’t really expect there are very many Arabic and Portuguese readers. 
• The font size now used in the stories is too big.  Monitors these days are big.  Take advantage of it by shrinking that font a bit so you can display more content without the visitor having to scroll. 
•  The layout is kind of odd.  The main content column is too narrow.  The third column doesn’t really seem to serve a purpose – dump it and widen the main column.
• The menu on the left is WAY too long.  I realize it is hard when you will be having a lot of content but that needs to be consolidated better into maybe a dozen links that perhaps open a cascading menu to ‘drill down’. 
• Dead links on the left.  Out of the 34 links on the left, only 13 actually go someplace.  Even the ‘Contact Us’ link is dead.  Remove them if they don’t go anywhere or better yet, see the previous item. 
• Page ‘header’ is too big and takes up too much screen real estate.  The images / list of the various papers should be shrunk to a single line and be much smaller.  The top area as well needs to be shrunk vertically.
• Weather?

There is probably more but the gist of my opinion is that the design just isn’t there yet and needs a good bit of work. 

Lastly, let’s talk subscription models and content.  Apparently there is still going to be little actual online news available unless you want to subscribe to the online paper for $30 per year.  We’re not entirely against a pay-to-read model of some sort but the way things seem to be setup out now, there isn’t much to entice subscribers and it is kind of confusing.

Newspapers are in a tough place now – the loss of the Rocky Mountain News stands as an example of that fact.  It is a tough balancing act for them and finding the right formula will be a struggle and we recognize that.

Very few newspapers charge for reading current news stories so it doesn’t seem like this is an improvement.  As a website visitor, am I going to pay to read a story I can likely get elsewhere for free?  Probably not.  I would think a more reasonable approach would be to make all current news free and available to everyone.  Stories more than say a month old would require a paying subscription.  This would seem to be a good balance and is a model used by many print publications.

What about print subscribers?  Do they have to pay the full $30 per year for website access on top of the $24 per year for the print edition?  I would think some sort of a ‘combo plan’ with a discounted price would be in order.  I subscribe to the print edition and would pay a reasonable price to add online access but I don’t think it should be full price.

For the online version, is every story in the print papers going to be online? Is there going to be an archive of old stories maintained and available for subscribers?  Or are subscribers only going to have access to current stories?  Without the archive available, the value is greatly diminished. 

Visibility is an issue for MetroNorth / MileHigh and the content – or lack thereof – is why.  As an example, do a Google search for ‘Thornton Colorado news’ – a pretty common phrase that folks might use when looking.  Where is the Northglenn-Thornton Sentinel’s website listed? I honestly don’t know.  I went through five pages of results and it was nowhere to be found.  Searching for Golden, Westminster, Wheat Ridge, and Lakewood all yielded similar results. 

If you can’t be found on search engines, there is a problem.  ‘Content is king’ when it comes to being seen online and if you have all that content hidden behind password protected pages, not only can your potential readers not get the news, search engines can’t find it either.  You are shooting yourself in the foot.   

A couple months ago I said:

In many ways, we long for something akin to the Longmont Times-Call.  While servicing a city smaller than Thornton, the Times-Call appears to thrive with a daily publishing schedule with tons of content and a great website.   The site features locally generated news stories but also has an AP news feed for national and world news thus providing added value for visitors.  Local advertisers flock to the site knowing the opportunity is there to cater to a local audience.

As I have said before, we truly like the Northglenn-Thornton Sentinel and believe all area residents should subscribe to the paper.  But, we do have to take a jab at their website again.  As we mentioned before, the design is something akin to what we saw on the Internet 10 years ago – hardly something that is fitting for a modern news organization. 

Much of that commentary still applies.  I acknowledge that the site is new and hasn’t even been live for a week and hopefully some of these issues will be addressed. 

Being a news junky, I want to see the effort of MetroNorth Newspapers and Mile High Newspapers succeed.  As north metro area residents, we all NEED the effort to succeed as otherwise we will be left without our only true, local news source. 

There is work to be done and this effort seems a bit rushed but there may be hope!