For the past several weeks, Ohio.com, the online home of the Akron Beacon Journal, has positioned a button ad on the right side of its home page where Dr. James George, DDS promotes his dental services. (By the way, doesn’t this guy look like James Lipton?)

Ohio.com doesn’t use its medium, the Internet, in the right way for two reasons:

1. The ad is an annoying Flash animation that blocks you from clicking on any news story in the path of a blimp that zips across the page.
2. If the blimp entices you to click on George’s button, an external application fires up to read a linked pdf.

Usability expert Jakob Nielson notes in his Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design that

Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.

Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate.

PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.

Worse yet, on slower computers or Web connections, unexpected pdfs have the tendency to crash browsers and computers. Even if that doesn’t happen, pdfs really slow down the users’ experience as their computers manage an unexpected download. On faster machines, less savvy users are disorientated, not recognizing that they are actually in an external application. I’ve witnessed this many, many times.  All sorts of other usability issues pop up with pdfs as Nielson notes in another post.

Ok, so we’ve established that pdfs generally are not user-friendly. What should have Ohio.com done?

1. If there must be an annoying flying blimp, which I’m sure the client loved, render it in javascript or some less obtrusive form of Flash so users can navigate to surrounding stories without interference. You still grab the readers’ attention but don’t meddle with their ability to use your product. (Journalists should also contemplate the ethical dilemma the blimp creates by obtruding their content.)
2. Get off their lazy butts and create a landing page for Dr. George. What an awesome upsale! Or at least do it like George does on his Web site. Although surrounded by an ugly wrapper, George’s coupon page allows you to print gifs of his money savers by opening them in a pop-up window. (If I wanted to get picky, I would point out that pop-up blockers are standard with many modern browsers and are on by default. By making the coupons a pop-up, many users will not see them — at least not easily.)
3. At minimum warn users that an external application will open a pdf of the coupons.

Ohio.com’s ad salespeople are really doing Dr. George a disservice by linking to a usability-unfriendly pdf of his printed ad and deploying story-click-blocking animations. They are not alone. Many newspapers republish pdfs of their print ads online as a “service” to readers — but more accurately as a disservice to their advertisers. The online salesforce would do better to take advantage of the Web’s abilities rather than lazily posting a pdf of the newspaper ad.

Medill’s tool takes news-story commenting out of the ghetto. You know you’ve seen it — those awful, racist, and oftentimes off-topic comments made under some news articles. Newspaper Webmasters have been notoriously awful at moderating their communities. Ohio.com, the online home of the Akron Beacon Journal, once used Topix.net for its commenting. Not only were the BJ people outsourcing their comments, they were sending them to Topix, the ghetto of commenting ghettos. Much to the publication’s credit, the Beacon moved its comments back on site a few months ago.

News Mixer features three ways to converse:

1. Q&A – Leave questions for reporters or other readers
2. Quips – Short, less than 140-word thoughts
3. Letters to the editor – Longer than quips and the software allows editors to highlight the best

The icing on the cake, though, is the Facebook ID integration. This forces users to use their real identities — although the users could fake a profile on Facebook, just like anywhere else, but I don’t see this as likely as on-the-spot Web site registration. The social-networking integration isn’t completely new. A couple months ago, CNBC inked a deal with LinkedIn to use that social network’s profiles on its site.

Facebook Connect Live lists what sites are using its new platform. With Facebook Connect, users can utilize their Facebook ID’s to log into other sites to leave comments and extend their identity beyond the walls of Facebook. This is similar to OpenSocial and OpenID, which I’ve written about before.

Perhaps Newsmixer will help end the debate over the value of story commenting. Yes, there is value! Blogs and other non-newspaper sites have proven this for the past few years. The difference, though, as Techdirt notes (emphasis mine):

The argument [against commenting on newspaper sites] is, basically, that a lot of the comments are really dumb, and don’t add very much. That may be true, but in many cases, that’s because the newspaper doesn’t give anyone incentive to add smart comments. There’s no indication that anyone at most newspapers read the comments. The authors of the articles rarely, if ever, respond to people in the comments. There’s little to no engagement or discussion. So, instead, the comments just become a way for readers to vent. Just tossing up comments and thinking you’ve created a community is a mistake — but that doesn’t mean newspapers shouldn’t enable comments. It just means they should do so in a more intelligent manner.

I onced suggested — and received a fantastic guffaw from an older journalist — that we should treat stories online more and more like blogs. Does this mean dropping objectivity and providing more analysis than just-the-facts-m’am? I don’t know, but I do think it means writing stories and directly engaging the people who comment below them. Aside this News Mixer system, reporters should be regularly responding to and commenting below their stories. Arguably, these same journalists, with some help, should be managing the online communities of their beats.

(News Mixer stuff via Patrick Beeson)

While the Gazette has long been negligent in its online efforts, the reporting and photography at the paper has always been top-notch, garnering many awards for the 15,000-some circulation publication. Within the past two years, the Web site finally received a nice face lift, which was subsequently gutted for an awful replacement earlier this year. At least they enabled comments.

As circulations plummet, ad dollars evaporate and American newspapers head toward bankruptcy, what has the brilliant leadership (read: publisher George Hudnutt) decided to do for the Gazette? Start charging for content online.

George, where have you been for the past 18 years?

Nearly every attempt that an American newspaper has made to charge for stories or wall off content in the past 18 years has failed. Even the venerable Wall Street Journal is close to tearing down its pay wall. The New York Times couldn’t do it. Neither could nearly EVERY newspaper in the country.

Furthermore, who voluntarily reads a PDF of the newspaper? The system, developed by Tecnavia, takes PDFs and makes them like Web stories.

And why would this person pay for something that he or she can get for free here, here, here or here?

If I were an advertiser in Medina County, I would demand a refund. This new strategy is a rip-off and an attempt to prop up a business that apparently is failing. Why would I pay a publication that can’t seem to grow even in the midst of being in the county with the fastest-growing population in all of Ohio? Now, instead of pushing forward, the Gazette is taking several large steps back.

Reading this article makes me wonder if Hudnutt even owns a computer. What he’s describing in this online PDF is what Web sites have regularly done for the past 18 years.

“It makes the actual content of the paper, the full content, clickable so that you get the whole paper rather than the traditional Web site … They (Tecnavia) developed the program we are currently using to display our newspaper pages for newspaper and education purposes,” Hudnutt said. “They process the pages in what you might call a super PDF where all of the content is searchable.”

“This new product … on the Web will offer the universe to our advertisers,” Hudnutt said. “Anyone, anywhere, can access their ad over the Internet.”

He said any Web address the advertiser decided to add would be clickable. For example, if an advertiser wanted to put map directions to his business in the ad, a user could click that link and directions would pop up.

“It’s something newer that we haven’t seen before,” Hudnutt said. “It seems to be working out really well.”

Being privately owned may not help many community publications’ survival, after all.

Pat Thornton writes about a family-owned 25,000 circulation newspaper near Cleveland. Though he does not name the paper, it has to be the Gazette’s sister, the Chronicle-Telegram of Elyria. Earlier this year, the Elyria publication finished buying and installing a $12 million press. This new press allowed the two papers to condense production.

At about the same time, the two laid off production and editorial staff. Elyria Publisher Cooper Hudnutt claimed that “the layoffs came as a result, basically, of the economy. Some of them were because of the consolidation, but some weren’t.” The timing, perhaps, was a terrible coincidence.

Back to Thornton. He talked to an editor at the 25,000 circulation paper and was told that the editor pleaded with the publisher to take a small fraction of the millions of dollars he was going to sink into new presses and invest it online. The publisher saw no reason to.

And why not? I’m sure the 1990s were very good to the Hudnutts as Medina County’s population exploded. Although the Gazette never capitalized on the increased population, it had to have benefited from the increase in classifieds, real estate listings and auto advertising. Quite a few national chains moved into town, too, boosting circular ads.

Flush with cash, the Hudnutts probably saw no reason to invest in a pesky, money-losing Web site. That story is nothing new. If anything, they wanted a press that could print color on all pages so they could charge advertisers more.

“Clueless” may be the only way to describe the Hudnutts’ strategy. As long as the family continues to be rich and plan for retirement, why should they worry about taking a risk online? The Internet to them must still be a fad.

With the pile of cash that I’m sure the Hudnutts have, the Gazette could become quite the driving force in the community. Too many Medina families are bowling alone.

Imagine what a powerful, engaged local newspaper could do. The Hudnutts should be growing their giant sack of money with real, kickbutt journalism and community development. Ad salespeople should be retrained to sell the benefits of online advertising rather than just using the Web site as an add-on or upsale to the paper product.

The Gazette should be developing new audiences and products. I’m sorry to say when my grandparents pass on, another generation of reader does not exist to replace them. Meanwhile, free publications (including the Sun and a retooled Trading Post) offer news to the new population, challenging the Gazette’s once-held monopoly. The Hudnutts aren’t just clueless, they are negligent.

I love my hometown, and I hate to see its newspaper commit suicide. But every time I come home and leaf through the Gazette, I find less and less to read. It is a very thin paper for a growing community. Being a privately owned newspaper may not be the cureall, after all.

With a new Web site called Mygazines, you can scan in your favorite periodical and share it with the world. That’s a lot of work for something that is terrible to read on a computer screen.

Are publishers grateful for these extra eyes on their content and advertising? I guess not.

No, I don’t get the “convenience” of being able to read a print publication on my computer screen, especially when many Web technologies exist that allow you to do this more easily. MP3s, music, movies and software certainly lend themselves to piracy; I don’t think magazines do. I can’t think of a publication that I would like to spend time scanning. Plus, many of these magazines are already online for free!

But wouldn’t that be … awesome?

Some commenters on the Mashable article like the concept. One remarked that you could assemble articles from various sources into a single, uber magazine. This experience is something I think you could do more easily (and legally) via RSS feeds, blogs, news aggregators and the like. On your mobile, Google’s site for cell phones provides an excellent RSS reader, and there are various iPhone apps that also pull this off.

Another commenter thinks this site is the magazine industry’s Napster-like wake-up call. Uh, that wake-up call came nearly 18 years ago when the Web really took off. Newspapers and magazines alike have tried to put up pay walls on their sites and have failed miserably. The mainstream media’s problems are well documented, and I don’t need to elaborate on them ad nausam.

Go free

What does this mean for publishers? It’s just a repeat of something they should already know: you cannot control your information on the Internet. Information wants to be free, and there’s little you can do about it.

Free is not the future; it is now. Says “Free” author and Wired editor Chris Anderson:

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

Anderson goes on to outline how smart business people can make money off of “free.” Clever publication leaders should take note.

If publishers wanted to get ahead — well, at this point “even” — with the game, they would create a Mygazine-like service themselves and do it better. Make it more stable. Heck, they have access to the PDFs and raw files already. They should also drop Zinio and monetize it themselves. Make this service available for free on Kindle, and create iPhone and Android apps. This alone could boast sagging subscription rates and bring more eyes to grateful advertisers.

(And don’t just post your PDFs online. That’s lame and not in the most usable form.)

As we know, a publication’s subscription rate usually goes to the costs of getting it to you via snail mail. (There are exceptions, of course, like journals that survive on subscription dollars, rather than ad money, to deliver content.) Electronic distribution is nearly costless and gets valuable content into more hands.

Would dead-tree subscriptions fall? They already are. Look at this as a way to boost them in the short term. An aging audience is *gulp* dying off and the younger one that is replacing it is turning less and less to print products for information. People who like getting a magazine every week will probably stick to it because that’s the medium they most enjoy perusing. Those people aren’t going to go to these extra services. I think online and print audiences for some publications are different beasts, different demographics.

I won’t use Mygazines, but its arrival shows there’s some sort of demand. Are magazine publishers listening?