In the internet business you get used to seeing the work you’ve done slowly disappearing from public view. After well over ten years building websites and associated systems it’s something that rarely bothers me. However, this week’s announcement by the Manchester Evening News that they are relaunching their website did raise my hackles somewhat, but not because they’re discontinuing the last remnants of systems I helped to design and build.
I worked at the MEN from 2005 through to 2010. In late 2006 it was decided that we would relaunch the Manchester Evening News website. Usability consultants were hired, and managed to persuade everyone that the site should carry less adverts, some fancy new search technology was purchased, and everyone got together and focused on making the site better. On the dev team we got chance to modernise our development practices. We started writing unit tests, adopted an MVC architecture, that sort of thing. Nothing you’d call bleeding edge, but it was real progress from where we’d been previously.
This all came to fruition when the site launched in early 2007. In terms of its presentation, user experience, and interactivity our site knocked the socks off all other UK regional newspaper sites, and plenty of the nationals too. That sounds arrogant, but I really believe it was a higher quality product. We continued to improve the site over the years, but as the UK newspaper industry was hit by falling ad revenues the room to produce high quality web products slowly wore away. The days of the site carrying only 2 ads per page soon became a distant memory, and by the time GMG sold the MEN to Trinity Mirror in February 2010 we suspected the game was up.
After 3 years in charge Trinity Mirror are finally replacing the site with a new one based around the same design and systems they use to power the Birmingham Mail. No surprise there, and I think most of us would have expected that to happen well before now. What is a surprise is the disregard Trinity Mirror are showing for the MEN’s extremely active user community.
The MEN site was lucky to inherit a strong user base from it’s predecessor, Manchester Online, not just in terms of the number of users, but their willingness to comment on articles. Even since the explosion of Twitter and Facebook the MEN has continued to attract volumes of user comments that only a handful of UK national news websites can match. It’s quite common for football stories to receive over 300 comments in the space of a few hours. I’m reliably informed that the site currently has 2.2 million published comments stretching back over 12 years.
The announcement that the new site will require users to re-register using their Facebook accounts has understandably provoked a backlash from contributors. Many users of the site are what can be politely termed silver surfers. In essence they’re the kind of people who still hold local newspapers in some esteem, they’ve probably never heard of pinterest or tumblr, they don’t own an ipad or a nexus, and a lot of them don’t actually have Facebook accounts.
Many other MEN users don’t want to connect their MEN comments with their Facebook profile, it’s true that the ability to post completely anonymously can lead to aggressive behaviour within online communities, however there are lots of legitimate reasons why users might want to be able to post without including their picture and a link to their facebook account. Say there was an article about an extremist political demonstration happening on your doorstep, would you feel comfortable contributing to the discussion under your real name with a picture of your face and a link to your facebook profile?
Sadly having to re-register with Facebook isn’t the only inconvenience that MEN users will have to experience. There’s no reference to it in the article about the new site, but the site will not include previously submitted comments. Yep, over 2.2 million comments will magically disappear from the site. So users will get an email effectively saying “your account is being deleted, please sign up again using a social networking site you may not be a member of”, then those who do register will see that the comments they’ve spent hours of their own time contributing have all been deleted.
It seems like an incredible own goal for Trinity Mirror to risk completely destroying the MEN’s user community in this way. Except for the articles submitted by MEN journalists, the site’s users and their contributions are surely the greatest asset it has. It’s one thing if Trinity have decided that the community aspect of the MEN site cannot be effectively monetised, it’s another if they just hadn’t noticed it was there, or they just expect users to come back regardless of the hoops they have to jump through. Hopefully they’ve at least thought about what they’re doing.