I have heard and seen so many stupid ideas with the Web that I realized that one thing most newspapers and editors lack is common sense.

That’s why every newspaper needs to go out right now and hire a Vice President of Common Sense (thanks Bill Simmons). The premise is simple: every time an editor, marketing director, publisher or whoever had a “great” idea for the Web, he or she would have to run it by the VP of Common Sense.

And usually that idea would be rejected within seconds.

Here are three ideas that have either been tried at my paper or suggested that defy common sense:

1. Let’s add a stock ticker and quotes to our site

What a great idea. Every reader of my 100,000 circulation paper has been thinking the coverage over at CBS Marketwatch, Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance!, Wall Street Journal, etc was sorely lacking. What better way to connect with readers than by offering an extremely limited financial tool on our site.

The best part is that it would cost a lot of money each money. Are you kidding? I have a free widget on my computer that is updated every few minutes with stock prices and keeps an eye on several indexes.

This idea is beyond comprehension. The only way to make money on the Web and to grow your audience is by offering niche content. Offering something like stock market information is the antithesis of niche, especially when you don’t offer any business or market stories to go along with the stock information.

Plenty of bigger and better publications have cornered the market and offer much more in-depth financial services.

People don’t go to papers this size to get highly-commoditized financial information. They come to our site for the original news we provide.

Niche content is key.

You will not make money offering something that lots of other people offer, especially if you offer a much less in-depth version.

2. Headlines on a cell phone

This is what our readers want: headlines sent to their phones. Not stories, just the headlines.

Is this so they can plan ahead which stories they want to read? There is no sense in offering any mobile technology that doesn’t allow people to actually consume content. But what makes this worse is that our Web product needs a lot of work.

You start from the ground up. Offering mobile services when you have a poor Web product (most newspapers have poor Web products) is like buying home owners insurance before you own a home. It’s illogical.

Even if we did have a good Web product and people could actually read our stories on their mobile devices, I don’t know how big of a feature this would be. Most mobile devices are less than ideal for reading text.

Why are people trying to find more ways to disseminate print content? We need to think of content that works for each format.

What works for print doesn’t always work for online. What works online doesn’t always work on a mobile device.

The litmus test you should always apply for features like this is, “would I use this feature?”

If someone asked me that I would have responded, “not once.”

3. Print stories read by a computer

I don’t make this stuff up people.

Our Web site offers “podcasts.” It’s a computer program that automatically makes a “podcast” of each story. It’s just a computer reading off each story.

No one wants this feature on any site. People are more than capable of reading, and if they have a visual impairment their own computer software screen reader already has them covered and probably offers much greater flexibility and usability.

What makes this far worse is that it’s a computer reading the stories, which means it mispronounces a lot of people’s names and places. Just thinking of this sentence makes me shutter: “Gen. Petraeus visited the Anbar Province to meet with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to discuss remnants of the Baathist leadership.”

When you have as many reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan as we do, it’s bound to happen.

All three of these are terrible ideas. Ideas that I would have shot down immediately because they lack common sense and a fundamental understanding of the Web. Two of them were shot down, while the third is actually on the site.

It is what it is. Part of the problem newspapers have is that most of the senior leadership is much older than me and yet they are the ones in charge of implementing features and technology meant to attract people my age.

They don’t understand the technology and are easily persuaded by marketing pitches about “the next big thing.”

But if every paper just had a VP of Common Sense who understood the Web and, more importantly, used lots of Web technology in his or her daily life, that paper would have a substantially better Web product.

Gannett started its “24-hour information centers” earlier this year, which included paying a staffer to come in overnight to post “breaking news” to their respective sites. The Daily Record stopped doing this within a few months because the idea lacks common sense.

You’re a 40,00 circulation newspaper in the suburbs. What kind of breaking news could you possibly have at 4 a.m.? CNN might have people working overnight, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for everyone.

That money would have been much better spent on adding a new media journalist to produce original, compelling content for the Web.

Remember the big craze a few years ago over electronic editions of newspapers? Many newspapers spent millions on software that would allow people to view PDFs online and navigate through them. This is an idea that is so backwards that the people who thought of this clearly knew nothing about the Web.

The whole idea of the Web is to make Web pages, not link to static documents. Yes, these readers made PDFs much more dynamic and allowed for some linking, but they were huge, slow to load and unwieldy.

And of course not really searchable.

That’s why no one uses them anymore. Users spoke and newspapers had to listen, but it makes a lot more sense to listen before implementing a terrible feature.

Lots of editors probably loved the idea because it allowed them to put a print product online that looked a lot like the print product. But the Web is not print!

It’s an idea that defies common sense. I don’t go to Web sites to try to find newspapers. I go to Web sites to find Web sites.

Putting stories in HTML documents allows them to load quickly, be highly searchable and dynamic. It’s everything that a PDF could never be.

People come to the Web for the Web.

That’s just plain common sense.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 1:58 am and is filed under Mainstream Media, State of journalism, new media journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.