Three really clever ideas dropped into my inbox this week.
One was a promising small exclusive. One commentary from a serious person that directly related to a story I was working on. One a really interesting sounding map/graphic, that if it was as good as it promised might well have been used in full.
The problem was this: I couldn’t see any of them beyond the subject line.
Either the link didn’t work, or the formatting made it unreadable, or I was directed to do something like this: Just go to our website. Download our app. Enter a password which we will text to your mobile. Stand on your head and sing a Christmas carol.
None of us are going to do any of this.
The pity of it is that clearly a huge amount of effort went into the creation of the content. And seemingly none went into the delivery of said content.
It’s perhaps worth remembering that newspaper computers tend to be old-fashioned. (State of the ark, someone said.)
Such brain power as they have is eaten up dealing with complex internal publishing systems. They aren’t set up to do clever things in regards to seeing anything that isn’t a simple email.
