Um.
OK, so when the Tucson Citizen announced it was going to be reborn as the “Voice of Tucson” I expected rampant suckiness. But … this?
Meet the new Tucson Citizen, coming to you on Word Press, a free blogging software.
We know Word Press. For three years, that’s what we did our blogging on here at Weekly World Central. It’s nice freeware. We used it because we launched blog.tucsonweekly.com with no budget and no tech department to speak of.
But for Gannett/Tucson Newspapers—with all their resources—to use it to launch the new “beta” version of the Citizen? Two words: Fucking. Joke.
This is not a criticism of Mark Evans and Ryn Gargulinski; they’re doing the best they can, I presume, in a no-win situation.
But Tucson Newspapers and Gannett should be embarrassed. This is appalling. Gannett’s getting half of TNI when this is their contribution to Tucson media?
Lame.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2009.
Their design is sucky and amateurish, even for a beta.
But I’m not sure why the problem is WordPress in particular. Is there a different blogging platform you think they should be using instead?
The problem is that it’s th default look of Word Press. They only customization they bothered with was the logo at the top. They didn’t even change the default colors. Lame.
The point is that they’re using freeware, period–and not doing a damn thing with it.
And the site hasn’t been working for most of the afternoon.
Don’t tell Mrs Herreras, but that beloved Tucson Citizen Red Star cachet hangs on over there at:
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/users/92874
enjoy…
Gannett could have spent some money on the site, but then it would cut into the golf budget.
The fact is there are a lot of large newspapers running blogs on wordpress: New York Times, CNN.com, Reuters, and more. To attribute the citizen’s poor implementation of wordpress to the fact that wordpress is “freeware” is a mistake. It is a perpetuation of the idea that open source software is all bad. It’s simply not true.
What is true is that the citizen made a mistake by not doing better from the start. They would’ve done better for themeselves to at least theme it with some kind of unique branding instead of giving it a very “default” look. They will find they will have to do a lot to regain users trust to revisit the site because of that mistake.
Hey JimJim, when was the last time you put up a multi-blog server with a custom template made for over ten blogs? In a week? Wordpress is a great piece of software that makes doing this exact chore a lot easier. So extrapolate from these conditions, Sherlock, and you might see that they only had enough time to do exactly what they did.
Hey. WeeklyGash. We did it back in 2006. It looked a heck of a lot better than this.
Hey WeeklyGash, I have six blogs running on wordpress, all of them using the freeware without tweaking the defaults too much and ALL of them look better than the Citizen’s attempt.
And most of them were put up in about a half hour. And they didn’t have to take down the old site (which by the way, isn’t actually down, just ignored and abandoned because the Citizen obviously doesn’t want to pay TNI to maintain it with IT guys or webdesigners who know what they’re doing).
Blogs are not rocket science. I have a 70 year old client who now maintains his own site and he hasn’t screwed it up as much as TC.
Biggest problem TC has is the quality of bloggers contributing. Not an interesting or literate one in the bunch. Mostly seem to be friends of the editors or former commenters who happen to have hobby blogs or active Myspace accounts (TC hoping to drive their readers to the “new” site? Callous considering the drenching the noobies are taking from the readers of TC).