This is what appeared on The Age’s home page this morning (with my additions).
They explained that there’s a new video tab, which you’ll see when the lead story is best told in video.
Eh? How is Ultimate Fighting in any way to be regarded as the lead story? Unless Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott jumped in the ring.
And why is a pr0n star (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess it’s about Tiger Woods; I didn’t click on it) a related story to anything on that page?
What I do like is that they’ve split the Victoria and National stories apart, though as-of lunchtime some stories appear to be in the wrong spots — I doubt for instance that today’s Myki story has much national significance.
The Today’s Paper link reflects what’s in the print edition for the day, which is probably a good idea. I like the way it gives more prominence to the PDF copy of the front page.
And I wonder if this declaration is laying down the gauntlet to News Ltd, who have said in the past they’d be moving to a paid content model: But some things haven’t changed. We still bring you the latest breaking news as it happens, free, all day every day, in words, pictures and video.
Anyway, despite the teething problems, interesting to see them changing things around. Now, if they can just get rid of the annoying habit of having the video stories autostart…
11 replies on “The Age’s new home page”
“I doubt for instance that today’s Myki story has much national significance”
I beg to differ. It’s even been reported in New Zealand. I imagine the Kiwis are either laughing their heads off -or- debating against the introduction of such a system in Auckland.
I think it’s of general interest to the rest of Australia, in that it’s yet another government I.T. disaster on top of Grocery Watch, Fuel Watch, Conroys Clean Con (a pending disaster), T-card, and various ATO projects.
Personally, I think they *averted* disaster by cancelling the T-card project, but I note that others call it a disaster anyway.
Nick.
Nick, I know Myki is now infamous nationwide, but is today’s story a national one? Google News shows no further coverage of it.
Good observations, Daniel.
The Age online is certainly a down market version of the printed version. Too many boobs and zany stories.
They’ve added a ‘Do Not Play’ link to videos, which is a minor improvement. Surely they have to know you should never automatically start video content so it makes me wonder what their reasoning is for doing so.
A lot of the videos start with an ad of some kind – I suppose they can charge the advertiser more if the videos start automatically.
one way around the video issue, still a pain but i use this method at work to try to keep the bandwidth police off my back, is to copy the link and then paste it in your URL box and change the last param from 1 to 0:
?autostart=1
becomes
?autostart=0
I’m glad I’m not the autostart on videos pisses off ! :-)
I did fill in their feedback form once…..not that it’s likely to help
Another vote against auto-start. The do-not-play link is at least something, but it shouldn’t be necessary.
I have a plug in with Firefox that blocks all video content unless I choose to play it. Much better.
So annoying! Our work internet freezes everytime The Age videos start, so if its on the main page, or I want to read an article with a video in it, its a no go. SO ANNOYING! Our internet settings don’t allow me to disable videos on websites either!
Jen, that happened to me a couple of years ago:
http://www.geekrant.org/2008/08/03/flash-crash/
At the time I had the latest version of Flash, but a little while later a new version fixed it.
Blocking Flash on the site worked for me, but realise that’s a problem for you.