The Times behind the Paywall

In the past I have been hovering between coolly-supportive and warmly non-committal when discussing the issue of Paywalls for online newsites.

It's a hugely emotive topic with a large proportion of the London-based media-scene being anti on the basis that content is free and that it is a sign of a burgeoning democracy of information.

The arguments for are, of course, that the media industry is suffering and suffering badly. Would Rupert Murdoch been quite so keen to close the NOTW if the profits had been at pre-Web 2.0 levels? The Guardian - the most fierce critic of paywalls - is in strife and the Guardian Media Group flogged off their regional arm to prop up the huge losses it was making?

I am currently doing a research project into reporting of the transfer window in football and one of the things I was most looking forward to was being 'forced' to subscribe to The Times online and see what all the fuss was about.

What a massive disappointment it has been. I have been looking at the site for almost a month now and I find it littered with poor practice in terms of layout, presentation and navigation.

I'll start with the homepage:



What an unappealing mass of text that is - no sentence breaks, no paragraph breaks just words chucked on a page. Then there's the primary navigation bar. I had to check with a colleague that my eyes weren't going - that it really was that fuzzy and out of focus (trust me, it's not my picture this time).

Then they opt for an extremely clunky hover menu.



I may not have the fastest broadband in the UK but that seems to slow the whole process down and, to my eyes at least, it is not an attractive thing designed to ease your way around their site.

And it does what bad hover menus do - when you drag the mouse from the primary to the top of the secondary (From Sport to Football in this case), you frequently get switched to the Money menu because your cursor is taken over that section of the navigation.



Next we'll go the football section.

More chunky text and this time words are cut off half-way through.



The appearance of that disembodied ",a...." looks incredibly amateur to my eyes.

Moving on through the page and the appearance is decent. The stories are well-ordered according the news-agenda of the day and there is a good amount of white space to make for a pleasant viewing experience.

But there are not many stories on the page and I think I want to find more. I want to read more about the Premier League and I spy that that the titles Premier League and More Premier League are links. But when I click then I am taken back to the top of the page as the link only goes to the main football page. Same with the Columnists link and now I am very disappointed because Matthew Syed is one of my favourite journos.

How about the Championship? My club Derby County are on the up so I'll read about what Clough jnr is up to.

Where, for the love of blood and stomach pills, is the Championship? In the Hover Menu? No. A separate section in the football page? No. A random link in a list? No.

I am sure it is there somewhere but by now I am off to somewhere else. Despite the fact I am paying for the Times, I do not use it for any kind of news information.

The proud claim of the Times was that it was bringing in a paywall to protect and maintain its quality. That has been a mega-fail.

I am disappointed because secretly I had hopes that the paywall would work. Journalism, and particularly investigative journalism (real investigative journalism not donning fancy dress and encouraging people to break the law), is an expensive business.

But you can't ask people to pay and then offer them a significantly reduced service.