Note: This post was destroyed due to blog glitches. I’ve managed to replace the texts, but many of the links no longer exist. My apologies.
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So, I should start off by saying that I have a ton of respect for everyone involved in TCJ. Dirk Deppey’s one of my favorite writers on comics; Michael Dean has been great to work for at the print Journal; Kristy Valenti is incredibly smart, pleasant, and hard-working, and a fine writer as well. I don’t know Gary personally, but I’ve enjoyed reading him over the years, and I greatly admire his work as an editor and a publisher. I’m very grateful, and, indeed, flattered, that such a smart and talented group of people found something of value in this blog, and were interested in hosting it. I’m looking forward to being here for a long time (I mean, presuming this post doesn’t get me fired.)
I also want to say that there are a lot of things that I think tcj.com has gotten right. Most notably, I think TCJ has done a great job in getting an exciting and interesting group of writers together. I’ve been a big fan of Shaenon Garrity’s for a while, and it’s great to see her blogging regularly. I wasn’t familiar with Anne Ishii, but she seems like a spectacular choice — and much-appreciated evidence that the Journal is taking manga seriously. Same with the addition of Roland Kelts. Eric Millikin is also a very smart and inventive pick. I’m looking forward, too, to promised essays from Tom Crippen (who I was lucky enough to have writing at HU for a while), Matthias Wievel, Charles Hatfield, Kim Deitch, and Ben Schwartz, great writers all.
In addition, it’s worth noting that the website really could be worse. TCJ has avoided the cardinal website mistake of being so cute that your page is completely unmanageable. The page isn’t dripping with mystery meat gimmicks; you don’t have to guess whether the link to the print edition is under Charlie Brown’s maudlin head or whether it’s instead under Enid Coleslaw’s. There are a couple of miscues, sure (”Blood & Thunder” isn’t going to mean anything to anyone who hasn’t read the print journal guys, which means it’s not going to mean anything to anyone. The link should just be to “Message Board”, okay?) Overall, though, things are labeled in a reasonable way. That’s definitely worth something.
So if I like all that, what am I complaining about? Well, let’s start at the beginning….
I’m probably just not imaginative enough, but I’m having difficulty coming up with ways in which the rollout could have been more botched. Johanna Draper Carlson has a good summary of the issue #300 mess, which I’m not going to harp on further here. But even setting that aside, the opening days of tcj.com have been…well, let’s call it unfortunate. Instead of an actual official announcement with attendant hoopla and excitement, the launch was spilled quietly by blogger Rob Clough. (Not that that’s Rob’s fault; I doubt anyone told him not to.)
In addition, the launch itself was made from Beta. This had a number of unfortunate effects.
First, excitement was somewhat muted, since the site wasn’t *really* ready — I saw at least one blogger (I can’t remember who) write that TCJ was “sort of” launching, which isn’t the kind of thrilling introduciton you want, I don’t think. Second, the fact that the site was in Beta meant that there were a lot of details to fix…and fixing them meant that portions of the site were going up and down and all around for more than a week. As of this writing, things are still pretty massively fucked-up actually. Thus, at the very moment when tcj was presumably hoping for a major influx of traffic, lots of stuff didn’t work. This was especially problematic in regard to Dirk’s blog Journalista, which, in theory, should have been able to direct lots of people to the new site but which instead was relegated to a kind of half-life on the tcj.com main page while it’s old tcj.com/journalista address went in and mostly out of service.
In short, tcj.com launched before it was ready to go. I can think of various explanation for why they might have done this (promises to advertisers seems the most likely), all perfectly reasonable, just as the decision to pull TCJ #300 because of vendor concerns was reasonable. However, the upshot of these reasonable decisions is that readers end up irritated.
And I think that that’s kind of a big problem. Not because the opening was fucked up; I mean, that’s bad, but the launch is just the launch; the website is hopefully going to be around long enough that people will forget that. But the psychology behind the launch worries me.
Basically, it’s not clear to me that tcj has figured out how to think like its readers. Or, to put it another way, it’s very unclear who this website believes it’s talking to.
The great thing about the internet is that it’s easy to find the stuff you’re interested in, and only the stuff you’re interested in. I can go to the Atlantic website, for example, and read Andrew Sullivan without having to even look at a whole range of other bloggers who annoy or bore me (I’m talking about you Jeffrey Goldberg.)
Again, this is the Internet’s strength. And so what does TCJ.com do? It puts all it’s bloggers and writers and essayists in a single, streaming blog, regardless of whether they’re likely to attract the same readers. There’s a ton of content, but it’s not focused content. It’s not catering to the super-hero crowd, obviously; it’s not catering to the manga crowd — but it’s not really resolutely snobbish like Comics Comics, either. And though there’s not a focus, it’s also not organized in a way that makes it easy to find the bits you want to look at. For just about everyone, I think, the noise to signal ratio on tcj.com is going to be very high. It’s great to have Anne Ishii writing — but are the manga fans who are presumably her audience even going to be able to find her in the scrolling wall of unrelated text that is TCJ.com? (And yes, you can click on her name on the side and get all her posts…but that presumes you know you’re looking for her. You want to be appealing to people who aren’t necessarily already familiar with your content, not just those who are.)
There is some recognition that this is a problem, I think. It’s why all the posts are cut off after a paragraph or so with that annoyingly automated “Read More” link. In theory, the idea is that if everything’s truncated you can just scroll past and find what you want. In practice…well. Many of the posts are fairly short, but not so short that they get in under the “read more” break. So you’re constantly going past stuff you don’t want to read to find the one thing you do, and when you get there you read down until the “Read More” snaps you off in the middle of a sentence, and then you click the link and you get, not a whole essay, but just another 20 lines of text or whatever. Add in the giant flashing ads on the side, and…yeah, it’s just not a how I want to read my Internet.
In addition, the website often presents things in a way that make sense to the writers and editors, but not necessarily to the readers. For instance, the homepage shows two lists, one of bloggers and one of essayists. Okay. But…what is the practical difference for readers of the site? As a writer for tcj, I know that these groups are treated differently in certain ways — but why do readers give a shit? It’s all content going through the same sluice.
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So…what to do? Well, in the short term I’d first try to see if I could tone down the flashing ads. I’d also see if I couldn’t figure out a way to make there be more of a clear visual break at the end of posts; as it is, the post text goes right into the little notation about RSS feeds and so forth, which is really and unexpectedly distracting. I’d also think about giving writers more control over the Read More placement, and I’d try eliminating it altogether for shorter posts. There’s just no reason to go to Read More when you’re only writing 300-500 words. (Robot 6 is one example of a group blog which seems to have figured out a better Read More compromise length — and to be just in general better designed for readability.)
In the longer term, I’d think hard about giving some folks separate blogs. Ken Smith is an obvious candidate, as his interests and everyone else’s are fairly distinct. A more or less manga-themed blog with Anne and Shaenon and whoever else fits seems like a decent idea as well.
And just overall, I’d separate bloggers out from essayists. Though as I said they aren’t clearly differentiated now, they should be. Blogging is really about self-publishing; the attraction of a blog, for readers and for writers, is the sense that you’re having a conversation, with little filtering. Having all the blogs go through the mainpage, and having them split up with essays, really dilutes and muffles the sense of individual voices and idiosyncratic interests which is what people go to blogs for. That’s especially the case if bloggers really are being asked to keep posts to under 500 words, as Rob said.
Essays, on the other hand, are ideally more formal and more curated…and, again ideally, should be teased and promoted rather than just dropped into a blog format. Splice Today, where I occasionally write, has a pretty good, no nonsense way to present essays which is somewhat bloglike, and could serve as a model. Or the Onion AV club, where you have a menu of essays could work. Basically, if you have an essay, you want to put it out there as a completed piece you’re proud of. And, you know, you want to keep it in one or at most two big chunks, grouped together, not in 5 scattered and dismembered segments.
And there should definitely be a menu of recent stories, or perhaps a scrolling list of popular stories (Splice Today does this) so that there’s some easy way to see what’s recent or important without going down the whole damn page.
Also, and finally, I’d think hard about how on earth I was planning to make money. Maybe tcj has cracked the code for surviving off of internet ad sales, but…well, I’m a little skeptical. The short-term goal needs to be upping subscription to the print Journal, surely. Don’t, then, for god’s sake, put your link to the journal subscription up in the ad banner. Put it down somewhere in editorial. And put it on our lowly subdomain too, for God’s sake. We want to help!
Even if, you know, we’re out on our collective ears tomorrow.
Given the number of bloggers and essayists, I think they should expand the number of posts on the front page from ten to twenty (or more).
An example of a blog that mixes blogposts and essays and gets it right?
http://arstechnica.com/
A one or two sentence lead-in and, maybe, an image are all that needs to be on the front page. The entire essay or blogpost should be behind the jump.
Makes for a clean, inviting and useful front page.
Hey Golan. Yeah, I agree that that seems a good bit easier to deal with.
And my apologies for the all caps comments. There are still some bugs in the system, obviously….
Noah,
I agree with a lot of your points, especially with regard to publicizing the new site. I get that this is still sort of a beta version and there were issues to sort out, but I was surprised that there was almost no attempt to get the word out in a more focused manner. I also expected more folks to make announcements like I did to inform readers what changes they’d be likely to see in what I was writing.
I also agree that longer essays read better as single chunks, as opposed to be parsed out over several days.
Overall, I’m really impressed by the sheer breadth and depth of talent and voices on the site. I’m loving the short entries by Kent Worcester, for example. I agree that this avalanche of content does make the site a bit daunting to navigate at times, but I expect all that to be sorted out eventually.
Hey Rob. I know that for myself I was leery of making an announcement because I didn’t quite know what was or was not going to happen exactly.
I do hope they take some steps to make things easier to navigate, in part because, as you say, there’s been a lot of great content, and it seems a shame to see much of it getting more or less buried.
A number of good points here. I’ll second the separation of blog writing and more formal essays/review into 2 separate column as well as the inclusion of a small menu for more recent stories. My feeling is that the Onion AV Club homepage is a bit too busy for its own good but the Splice Today site is quite nice with interesting color coding and variation in font sizes. Is it possible that the TCJ website as it looks now is merely a stopgap pending future design improvements?
Hey Suat. My sense was that this was the design, not a stopgap…but I could be wrong about that. If that’s the case, that’s obviously good for the long term…but it does make their decision to go live from Beta even more baffling….
Noah, sorry your move to TCJ is such a mess.
Seriously, if any of the powers-that-be at TCJ.com read this, please a hire a professional web designer and a full-time editor with a successful track record in online publishing. This site will not succeed as is, no matter how good the content. The whole experience is a bad flashback to 1998. Which is kind of ironic given all the talk on HU about killing your business for the sake of nostalgia…
I don’t get ComicsComics being “snobby”. Just don’t see it.Nadel can get grouchy, but they seem to have pretty Catholic tastes, collectively, and present them in pretty earnest terms.
TCJ needs to do whatever it needs to to allow the site feed to be picked up Google Reader. Like a lot of people, I don’t browse from site to site anymore.
Hey Bryan. Well, that’s depressing. I was sort of hoping that I was exaggerating the problem…but I’m pretty sure your judgment is better than mine on this sort of thing.
I know they do have a professional web designer…though obviously the fact that you couldn’t tell that that was the case is not ideal.
Hey Uland. I think it’s the presenting them in “earnest terms” that I’m maybe reacting to. They just generally seem to see comics as serious business in need of serious study. It’s hard for me not to want to make fun of that a little…but at the same time, as I was trying to say, I think it’s actually good for a blog or site to have a strong perspective. It’s early days for tcj.com obviously…but it’s hard for me to see how they’re going to have a strong overall voice given the way they have things organized at the moment.
I’ll join in! I like the all-caps comments, as HU comment threads often made me want to yell. May they ever remain open to Taiwanese comment spam and random wingnuts like blackasthenight.
As to TCJ, the permalink structure is a mess! They’re using out-of-the-box, non-SEO-friendly weird-ass numbers… having a clearly marked silo structure, where everything fits into nice keyword categories, like “Manga,” “Marvel,” and “Noah,” would work better, with keyword-rich post titles… Admittedly TCJ’s already the 140,290th most popular site on the net (source:Quantcast), mainly from off-page factors. But I say get the SEO right at the beginning! Otherwise “Bill Randall” of the North Carolina GOP owns your damn name.
On second thought, maybe they’re waiting to see how Google’s Caffeine update plays out in January. Clever!
While I’m here, I’d like to single out Mr. Nicola Cuti’s “Moonie and the Spider Queen” ad as being almost on par with the “Two Tiny Men” ad of yore. Almost.
A very nice niche blog, and a good design there sparks Simplicity yet complex algorithm of the internet. Thank You
All good points, Noah. The other day I spent a few minutes in an endless circle of go nowhere links trying to get to an post that only appeared as a title in my RSS feed.
I’ll add in that, besides the “read more” annoyance issues, I really hate the paginated posts. Just give me the whole damn article so I can skim/read as I wish.
They also could be making better use of the RSS feeds. Firefox isn’t even auto-detecting that there are feeds, which is standard for WordPress, which means someone had to undo that particular feature.
I still haven’t figured out how to get to RSS feeds for most of the new blogs. This one works, but I haven’t been able to find feeds for any of the other blogs I’d want to keep track of. No way I’m coming here everyday to sift through everything, so until the RSS is sorted out, I’ll only be reading HU and Rob Clough, who’s been posting links to his pieces back at his RSS-friendly old blog.
Bill, I hadn’t even thought of the permalink bit. I changed the permalink titles here myself…and had to do it twice I think because it reset. It’s just a button though; hopefully they’ll change it over at some point.
Andrew, thanks for giving Bill his wish re: random spam. Makes it feel like home!
Derik and Ed, I know they’ve been having trouble with the RSS feeds. HU’s was down for a bit there; Dirk said they fixed it, and I’m glad to hear that that’s the case.
Ed, I’m not sure what other blogs you’re thinking of. Besides HU, there’s only guttergeek and the main page…which they should have an RSS feed for, though again, maybe it’s busted for the moment.
If anyone’s getting the RSS do you know…are they putting ads on the feed? I’m not very up on these things, but I understand that that is a fairly unobtrusive option, and one which is relatively easy to implement.
They also don’t seem set up to do Digg and Tweet and so on and so forth, which they should be.
Noah,
No ads in the RSS for HU, at least on Google Reader. WRT to RSS ads, If you put an ad in the feed, then give me the entire post. If not, I am more than willing to click thru to the actual site so TCJ gets credit for my eyeballs, so long as I have enough information in the feed to determine if I actually want to read the article. Also, having many interesting and well differentiated RSS feeds should be a priority when organizing the content on TCJ.com. Nobody wants to waste time sorting through a single fire hose of entires to find what they want to read.
Your social networking suggestion is a no brainer.
Another thing TCJ.com should be thinking about is making their content readily available on mobile platforms, like the iPhone and Android phones. These devices are rapidly becoming the primary means for people to access the Internet. The current layout works OK on my iPod touch, but many media outlets have easy to use, dedicated apps for their content, complete with embedded advertising. I would also think a large percentage of the TCJ crowd uses a Kindle, so some thought should go there as well.
Right. Still depressing me here, Bryan….
Noah,
Depressing is the spam that just showed up here. Even more depressing is Gary Groth’s recent entry on the front page. First of all, if he needed to be told that he should welcome everyone to TCJ.com, it does not give me a lot of confidence in his online acumen. I also don’t think it’s a good thing when some of the most valuable real estate on the entire website is overwhelmed by tag spam in the owner’s first post.
I think they must be working on some of these issues now, because the all-caps seems to be fixed. YAY.
I wonder if this was intended as a soft-rollout? (Why yes, I am being my optimistic to the point of dubious sanity again.) That would explain a lot of the main issues, like not advertising the new site and so on, so that they can deal with these issues before making their big debut in the fancy gown and up-do.
No, all caps still in effect. It shows up right in your inbox, but on the page it’s screwy.
Gary’s article is…yeah.
I’m hoping to get a better handle on the spam sometime in the near future. Sorry about that.
Huh. On my screen here, the spacing is a little off, but the all caps are gone.
I can hit the “subscribe to RSS” link on the Hooded Utilitarian main page, which is fine, but usually you are supposed to be able to click the RSS icon in the top right corner of Firefox next to the url to automatically find the RSS without searching for the link.
This doesn’t seem to be working for the Hooded Utilitarian main page, but it does work if I wanted to subscribe to the comment page.
What I mean is, if I want to follow Shaenon Garrity’s posts through RSS, can I? She’s listed as a blogger along with several others, but none of them seem to have RSS that I can find.
And as far as I can see, the comments are not in all caps here. Weird kerning, yes, but not in all caps.
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Weird…I’ve still got all caps…except for that pingback….
I’ve passed along some of these suggestions/problems to the powers that be. I think they’re still working on a lot of things, but hopefully they’ll put these in the cue.
And thanks to everyone who has followed us over here and/or commented. I appreciate it.
Okay, Dirk said it’s easy to set up an RSS feed for authors you like:
Here’s one for Shaenon:
http://www.tcj.com/?feed=rss2&author=3
He explains:
just add the
appropriate “&tag=SUBJECT” or “&author=NAME” after the end of the URL
for the site’s main RSS feed.
I should explain that by “&author=NAME” I mean the author’s ID number (as found in the left-hand column of the main site), not his or her name. But, yeah, jury-rigging RSS tags is easy, and I’ll try and get some sensible system of them going once the basic site itself is nice and stable. One thing at a time, y’all.
Pretty much everything you speak of can be fixed in WordPress very easily.
Also, Dirk, I’m assuming you are using the page function? Very useful and handy.
I’m not the person putting the site together this time around, thank goodness. The last one nearly drove me insane.
A bug?
I can login on the (archived??)message board with my old password, but somehow can not login on the main site. When I asked for a new password or a new username/password, no email was send to me.
FWIW, I still have a subscription to the deadtree TCJ.
Hey Paul. I’d put a note on the message board, if you haven’t already. Not sure Dirk is necessarily following this thread, so help may not necessarily be forthcoming from here…..
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All right, I”m going to have to close comments on this post unfortunately; it seems to be attracting ridiculous amounts of spam…..