The Ithaca Journal made some changes to its online edition this week that turned a navigable site into something confused, so we hope they're not done with it yet.
If you look at today's edition, your eye first lands on a feature that presents the day's top stories, ostensibly, divided into categories. One of the categories, somehow - in fact, the first one - is Softball, and the top story of the day is about the wildcard tie-breaker win of the Newark Valley softball team, which seems to be a school team, although this is not stated.
The rest of the news is located down the page, buried amidst a lot of ads, detours ("explore ithacajournal.com"; a "things to do" calendar, a "Find a Car Dealer" click-on box), and weird features (e.g., GetPublished!, where you click to publish your own news on their pages: "Announce your business, brag about your dog, review your school play", it says).
Maybe the idea is to keep you on the site longer, which makes the traffic numbers for the site look good. Or maybe it's to get you to revert to the paper editon, where you can more readily find what you want. Or maybe they're just trying hard - just a little too hard.
We hope it's the latter, and that the Journal will go back to the drawing board now that the dust has settled.
Steve Burke
for Ithaca Blog
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