Irishtimes.com: undermining the brand and disappointing the reader

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media

HE Irish Times has always been regarded

as Ireland’s “Newspaper of Record”

- never mind its minority protestant-na-

tionalist and then unionist origins or the

fact that the Irish Independent (and the defunct

Irish Press) generally outsold it by a consider-

able margin. Now Irish Times hardcopy sales

are declining at % p.a. and it is desperately

searching around for new sources of inﬂuence

and revenue.

To its credit the Irish Times pioneered on-

line newspaper publication in Ireland, ﬁrst as

Ireland.com, and then as Irishtimes.com. The

attempt to introduce a pay wall to garner more

revenue foundered with a rapidly declining on-

line readership and so it reverted to a free site

with, a subscription required only for archive

material and its E-Paper - a clunky facsimile of

the hardcopy newspaper, presumably intended

for those who like the hard-copy experience but

can’t get their hands on the hard copy itself on

a regular basis.

Nevertheless the ‘free-to-air’ Irishtimes.com

regained its position as one of the primary Irish

news sites with a wide and varied readership.

There were problems with the old site - many sto-

ries were only uploaded overnight once the print

edition was published. Articles were generally

not tagged, which meant it could be extremely

diﬃcult to re-ﬁnd that article you read yesterday

or last week, unless you could remember its exact

title or author. Its use of hyperlinks to relevant

sources and linked articles was sporadic at best.

Comments by readers could sometimes be lost

when the moment came to push the “post” but-

ton – or appear unpredictably some time later.

But the overall look and feel of the site was

suitably information-dense for a broadsheet

newspaper of record, and gave its content the

authoritative aura the Irish Times had built up

over many years. You might disagree with what

an article said, but you knew that it was impor-

tant because it had appeared in the Irish Times:

many people would read it and its content would

help shape national perceptions and debate on

any given subject.

The re-launch – into the

Facebook generation?

And then the Irish Times went and changed all

that and launched an almost entirely new site

on March th - and all hell broke loose amongst

its dedicated users , as evidenced by almost 

generally severely critical comments on the

site itself and other online discussion boards.

Conscious of the fact that a majority of read-

ers would soon be reading it on mobile or tablet

devices, the Irish Times sought a more “respon-

sive design” and one that could more easily be

read on smaller screens. The problem is that in

doing so, it dramatically reduced the amount of

information displayed on any one screen and

those users viewing it on a desktop or laptop -

still the majority - are presented with a screen

ﬁlled with pictures, advertisements and empty

spaces, and very little actual news or editorial

content.

It is almost as if the broadsheet paper of

record has been reduced to a Facebook page, full

of photographs and one-liners, and very little

substantive information. Gone is the sense of

what is happening in the world on a single page.

You have to scroll and scroll, and dig down into

many layers of menus to ﬁnd the story you want,

or to see if there is any new coverage in your par-

ticular area of interest. It gets worse than that.

Intrusive advertisements and “drop down on

hover over” menus appear at every opportu-

nity and an ill-timed or involuntary click, as the

menu drops down, gets you to a place you never

intended. Never has the browser “Back” button

been used so often by so many to so little pro-

ductive eﬀect.

But perhaps the worst problem is that the site

now has virtually no visual connection with the

printed paper itself. It doesn’t look or feel like the

printed Irish Times, or indeed any authoritative,

information-dense newspaper of record. All you

have as a reminder of where you are is a small

“The Irish Times” logo at the top of the page which

disappears as you scroll down. Lest anyone think

this is a silly traditionalist or stick-in-the-mud

complaint, it actually has some rather profound

reputational, branding and psychological impli-

cations: If the site you are on looks virtually no

diﬀerent from a plethora of other news sites, the

information it contains becomes essentially just

another generic “yellow-pack” commodity, no

more reliable or important than what you might

ﬁnd in any random Google search. You read it

with a much more critical eye, and dismiss it

much more easily.

Loss of the Irish Times Brand identity

We are presented with information overload

on the internet with many news ‘consumers’

frequenting a wide range of newspaper, TV, com-

munity blog and social media sites. How do we

determine what is truly important, insightful and

likely to be very well written? We go to sites and

authors that we trust: trust that has been built

up over many previous reading and sometimes

commenting and discussion sessions. This can

be a named author like Paul Krugman, the Nobel

Prize winning economist and columnist for the

New York Times. Or it could be a brand you trust

like the New York Times itself. The point is, you

immediately know - subliminally - that you are

on the New York Times site from the look and feel

of the site itself - and you see and read everything

there in the light of your previous experience of

that site.

Read the same article on an anonymous vanilla

site, and you won’t give it anything like the same

credence, time and attention. Read it on a site

you actively dislike - e.g. www.dailymail.co.uk/ -

and you won’t even give it the time of day. This is

a phenomenon that marketers have long known:

in a blind wine tasting even the experts often

can‘t tell which is the € bottle and which the

€ bottle. But these same connoisseurs will

Irishtimes.com: undermining the

brand and disappointing the reader

The old Irish Times website was much better than the new one

frank schnittger

You knew that it was

important because it had

appeared in the

Irish Times

 —  April – May 2013

media

argue long and hard over the merits of the €

bottle when they can see and feel it.

Many will of course argue that each and

every article should be read with a critical eye

and judged strictly on its own merits. But in the

real world, who has the time? The whole point of

branding is that it is a proxy for a critical analysis

of every individual interaction with a product or

service. You know you generally like a particu-

lar brand and so your default position is to trust

other products in that brand range. Occasionally

you may be disappointed, and if this disappoint-

ment is repeated you may change your mind about

the brand range as a whole. But when you select

and read hundreds of news and opinion articles

from many sources in the course of a week – from

a potential universe of millions of articles on the

internet – you have to take short cuts. So you

have favourite authors, and websites, and you

know you are there because there are many vis-

ual cues telling you this is from a favoured source

you have come to enjoy or trust.

Irishtimes.com used to be a brand extension of

the Irish Times itself. Now it is diﬃcult to know

what it is trying to be. Irish Times online editor,

Hugh Linehan writes of diﬀerentiating the online

from the hard-copy version of the paper, which

is ﬁne as far as it goes for the diﬀerent techni-

cal capabilities and limitations of various online

platforms. But if you distance Irishtimes.com

from the Irish Times brand, you have to create a

new brand identity, with diﬀerent content, target

markets and advertising strategies, and that is a

Amazingly, the screen-grab above shows three-and-a-half full screens of content displayed on Irishtimes.com when the site is being viewed at full width

on a laptop. The ﬁrst screen really only shows you the top banner ad, the Irish Times Logo, and the top-level menu. A drop-down menu appears if you

hover your mouse cursor over one of the menu options, but you can only read and select from the full menu if you scroll down the page ﬁrst, and then

hover back over the menu. Note the advertisements are in French, even though the website is being viewed from Spain (ie the laptop IP address is in

Spain)

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major and costly undertaking in its own right.

So what is the target market

for the new Irishtimes.com?

Some cynical observers have opined that the

Irish Times is aiming Irishtimes.com at a youth-

ful Facebook generation who want photographs

and one-liners – and who wouldn’t buy a hard-

copy of a broadsheet in any case – and in the

process force its older more “serious” readers to

go back to buying the hard copy. But this ignores

the fact that many Irishtimes.com readers are

from the Irish Diaspora who couldn’t buy a hard

copy on a regular basis in any case. It also ignores

the fact that existing Irishtimes.com readers

have many other online news sites to go to if

Irishtimes.com no longer serves their needs or

meets their tastes. Advertisers will not be slow

to depart the Irishtimes.com if they sense that

many of the more serious (and often moneyed)

readers are heading elsewhere.

Speaking of advertising, many users com-

mented on the ubiquitousness and obtrusiveness

of advertising on the new site. Irritating ads

damage brands. If the same ad for a product you

don’t want keeps ﬂashing across your mindspace

you will quickly form a very negative opinion

of that company in general, even if it also pro-

duces products you do want. Other than some

ads which change depending on the interna-

tional IP address of your internet connection

(with the example above incorrectly targeting

French-language ads at a Spanish-located laptop)

the new Irishtimes.com still uses a blunderbuss

advertising approach throwing the same ads at

all users/readers as if they were all one undif-

ferentiated mass.

Lack of personalisation

and blogging tools

This lack of personalisation applies to the Irish

Times content as a whole. You cannot create a

“MyIrishtimes.com” personalised home page

with a “Favourites” list of your favourite tags/

topics, authors or content areas.

The new Irishtimes.com site also a missed

opportunity to provide functionality that is

increasingly becoming the norm on the internet

and which is required to build an online com-

munity loyal to the brand. The old paradigm

of newspapers being a medium through which

professional journalists provided expert, privi-

leged, exclusive or highly informed information

and commentary to readers in a one way proc-

ess is dying. Some readers come for the bunﬁght

in the comments section at the end of an arti-

cle. Unpaid bloggers or citizen journalists are

increasingly providing highly insightful, spe-

cialised and expert analysis and content in

lead articles on many sites like Daily Kos or

the Huﬃngton post in the United States, the

European Tribune in Europe, and the Journal.ie

in Ireland. Information ﬂows have become mul-

ti-directional – between journalists and readers,

readers and journalists, and readers and other

readers. This can create an online community

and a ﬁerce loyalty to the brand. It also creates

the sort of users who spend a lot of time on the

site – the sort advertisers are more likely to pay

for.

But the new Irishtimes.com site provides

almost no new functionality for active readers/

contributors and bloggers. Comments threads

can still only be nested down one level, which

means it can be diﬃcult to follow which com-

ment is a direct answer or response to which

prior comment. It is impossible for commen-

tators to ﬁnd all their comments on various

comments threads in one place and thus keep

track of the conversations they are having. You

cannot see who is “liking” or responding to your

comments all in one place. As a result many com-

ments and excellent responses are lost in the

void, never to be seen again even by those who

wrote them.

Lack of usability testing

and quality control

The search feature on the new Irishtimes.com site

is so bad many users resorted to vanilla Google

searches outside the website in an eﬀort to try

and ﬁnd that article they had read and enjoyed

or commented on a few days ago. A lot of the

usual content was simply missing. Many articles

now require clicking on “next page” and “more”

buttons to get to the bottom of the article or com-

ment thread which means the user is continually

moving the mouse cursor back and forwards

from the scrollbar to the “more” button and

running the risk of triggering unwanted popup

menus or advertisements every time s/he does

so. Many of the most contentious – and tenden-

tious – comment pieces have no comment boxes

enabled beneath them. It seems only one opin-

ion is allowed. The new Content Management

System (CMS) at the heart of the new site has

the Irish Independent’s (Independent.ie) annoy-

ing habit of splitting words into fragments and

hyperlinking fragments to often irrelevant con-

tent streams: Thus European becomes “Europe

an” and Eurostat becomes “EU rostat” with the

EU linking to all articles pertaining to the EU,

and not speciﬁcally to Eurostat related articles.

In fairness some of the above issues may

have been teething problems during the transi-

tion to the new site, but this begs the question

as to whether the site had been properly tested

before going live. It certainly appears the web-

site hadn’t been tested adequately on a variety

of common phone and tablet devices and so it

simply didn’t work as designed. It all smacked

of a very unprofessionally-run website re-design

and implementation project.

Lack of transition management

and customer relations

Many readers will undoubtedly stay loyal and

get used to the new formats and layouts. Many

of the initial problems will be ironed out. But the

Irish Times cannot aﬀord to chase away a whole

tranche of users to an increasing array of com-

peting sites. Opportunities to attract and retain

new users were missed. Above all there was no

customer-relations or change-management

strategy readily apparent to this writer. Users

generally were never consulted on what new fea-

tures they would like to see, or what attracted

them most to the Irishtimes.com site in the ﬁrst

place. The new site was sprung on them with-

out warning.

The blogosphere has spoken on the Irishtimes.

com, Broadsheet.ie and other bulletin board and

online media sites, and it has not been a pretty

sight. In fairness, Hugh Linehan, the Irish Times

online editor, was assiduous in his responses to

many of the views and criticisms and some have

since been remedied. However the Irish Times

still has a lot of work to do if it is to regain its

pre-eminence as perhaps the most admired Irish

on-line news site.

Some might say “why all this whingeing at

what is essentially a free service?” The answer is

that it is anything but free. It costs a lot of money

to build and maintain an up-to-date fully func-

tional news website and unless you get a large

volume of traﬃc no advertising or pay-wall

model of business is going to be able to fund it –

and then you risk the ﬁnancial viability not only

of Irishtimes.com, but of the Irish Times itself.

Many users went to a lot of trouble testing and

exploring the site in order to come up with not

only reasoned criticisms, but also possible solu-

tions to the issues raised. This demonstrates the

fund of goodwill towards Irishtimes.com and the

concern of readers that Irishtimes.com would

make a success of the redesign. Building a loyal

online community is a collaborative project: If

you provide good substantive and up-to-date

content, good collaboration tools, good per-

sonalisation capabilities and a safe, moderated,

self-regulating blogging environment, a wall of

free internet expertise and energy comes ﬂow-

ing your way. Regrettably, the new Irishtimes.

com site still isn’t equipped to compete in social,

dynamic, and mobile web world and may even

have taken a step backwards with this unfortu-

nate redesign.

Users viewing it on a desktop

or laptop are presented

with a screen lled with

advertisements and empty

spaces, and very little actual

news or editorial content