Online Journalism A Few Years Ago vs. Today
The current design pattern for major news sites now orient heavily around two components: user comments and social media bookmarking. The user experience for both, however, are still abjectly horrible.
Commenting for most sites are usually installs of internally-designed commenting software that adds no authority, authentification, or much less tracking capabilities. As of now they are not much better than discourse between immature users on YouTube.
The success of social bookmarking sites such as Digg, and to a much bigger extent Facebook, have now skewed the motivation for publishing stories. Clicks are not equivalent to influence or authenticity.
Just placing IAB standardized ad units all around a body of text is no longer a workable business model.
I love the “Comments from fucktards nitpicking insignificant bits of the story” section.
