The Novice Journo

I’ve always liked Politico’s site much more than a lot of other news sites, but looking more carefully, there were places for improvement.

The Good:

• We liked the way Politico had little drawings of the reporters as part of the title bar for their blogs.
• The page is only one or two scrolls long.
• The blue and red theme went well with the political nature of the site.
• The audio slideshows were pretty good.
• The search by reporter or date feature was helpful.
• There aren’t many ads, and the ones they have a nicely placed. How do they make money though?
• The grid worked well: the pics were staggered, the left alignment was good, had continuity, three columns were good for widgets, twitter feeds, etc.

The Bad:

• Most of the story links were the same size from top to bottom, hard to tell which ones were supposed to be the most important.
• The cohesiveness of the site could use work: some of the individual pages like Click were really well done, but didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the site. Others like Campus hadn’t been updated in a long time and seemed useless.
• The audio-video quality wasn’t very good on a lot of videos, and some like “Gibbs and Takes” were boring.
• The bios on the reporters were cool, but a lot of them weren’t filled out.
• The “Most Popular” feature was too small and looked crunched.
• They had a map of the 2008 election results as the main feature on one page. No one cares about that anymore.
• A lot of links to the videos were broken, and would bounce you back to the main video page, or take you to the wrong video.

Some trends on online journalism seem really fun. Even though I think I didn’t do a very good job, I liked my foray into liveblogging. I’d like to learn how to cut audio and video for websites. I’ve embraced Twitter after initially thinking it was dumb.

But other parts of online journalism freak me out, to be honest. The demanding workload of a 24-7 newsroom intimidates me, because I already work 24-7 and wouldn’t like to do that forever.

Politico.com is actually a good example of this, because they are one of the few really online newsrooms, and their physical newspaper is just to make sure old fogeys think they’re legit. I met one of their reporters over the summer and she told me they work incredibly long hours. (She said 18 hours a day, 6.5 days a week, which I assume is an exaggeration, but still.) They are also expected to be on top of their games very early in the morning, something most journalists aren’t used to. When I worked at McClatchy Newspapers over the summer, if I came in before 10 a.m. hardly anyone would be there, either at the office or in the Senate Press Gallery.

I’m young, and not afraid of working hard, but the idea of working those kind of grueling hours for the rest of my life doesn’t sound like fun.

Then again, John and Roger are older than me, and seemed to have adjusted just fine to the different kind of work schedule. So maybe it just depends a lot on the news outlet a person ends up at.

Politico.com gets mostly old, childless men as visitors to its site. This is mostly the makeup of the congresspeople, aides and reporters that are the site’s target audience, so I would say they are doing a good job on that front.

Politico.com trails washingtonpost.com, cnn.com and nytimes.com in almost every category. However, since the site is new and has such a narrow focus I think the fact that they are even competitive with those big names says something about their popularity.

For example, for many recent days, they were about equal with cnn.com on referrals from search engines, close to washingtonpost.com on time on site, and close to nytimes.com on their bounce rate.

Check it out:

via alexa.com

So while it seems on its face like politico.com is really behind, they are still sometimes beating the big dogs who have been around for a much longer time.

This trend seems like it might continue, too. Except for their bounce rate, which was down a little, all their stats had increased. In particular, pageviews and reach both increased by more than 70 percent.