Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Say it: Las Vegas Sun headed in the right direction

Published on 11/01/08
by Zac Echola

The Las Vegas Sun recently launched a new Web site and I have a few criticisms. Overall, I think every paper in the country should find a way to emulate what the Sun is doing in terms of markup and general site design. I question a few other tactics.

The Good

Light use of photos and graphics makes the main graphics pop out and the page load extremely fast. Kudos.

The Sun has the most elegant markup I’ve seen on any current newspaper Web sites. With no inline styles, the table-less design will make re-skinning the site a snap down the road, should they feel the need to update. Separating content from format will save them months.

Item’s that need to be presented big are presented big, rather than simply on top. I love that the editorial picks share space above the fold with the constantly updated blogs that feed news throughout the day.

The Hi Def video looks beautiful. It’s well presented on both the homepage and the multimedia page. That you may download many videos in popular formats or embed them in your site is a step in the right direction.

The search! Simple yet powerful date span search aids in honing down keywords. Keywords are great for Google searches but news searchers generally seek specific items.

Human-readable URLs!

iCal exportable calendar!

The Bad

No ads? I love it, personally. But what a horrible business model! As of now, there seems to be no monetization strategy. That’s really bad news if you’re pushing video, let alone Hi Def video. Obviously an ad strategy will come, though I wonder how they came to the decision to roll out new site before building in ads. Seems silly to lose the revenue for no apparently good reason.

Feeds only exist for main sections, blogs and general comments throughout the site. But doesn’t some of that content overlap? I think we, as an industry, should be moving toward ever more granular feeds. As far as I can tell there aren’t any tags on news items. I’d like to subscribe to news, calendar events and blogs that only mention, say, McCarran airport.

The feeds are also partial text. Yuck.

Commenting requires registration. While a lot of anonymous comments amount to crap that must be moderated, a lot of good discussion comes from anonymous comments, too. I think the trade-off is worth it.

The Hi Def video sets you apart as far as a craft news goes, but what about commodity news? What about constantly feeding your site with brief video updates? Maybe the bloggers eventually do that, but I don’t see a site surviving on well produced Hi Def video alone. Not yet. Though, I really don’t know the Las Vegas broadband market well enough to comment. I do think the current strategy, while beautifully executed, feels old media. It lacks serious disruption against other competitors in the video arena.

The site, as of now, relies heavily on story-centric items. I’d like to see a solid push for database items. (For a start: There’s a LOT of money in Vegas, where is it all going?)

Update: Yoni Greenbaum just emailed this to me:

It looks like the lack of ads is the results of the JOA which has Las Vegas Review-Journal handling the advertising, circulation, production and marketing functions of the Sun, but having no involvement in the Sun’s website. In addition, the terms of the JOA “guarantees a second newspaper voice in the community”, so maybe online revenue is not a concern.

The end. Or is it?

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