*No prioritization of news stories, and the home page is not news
*Poor tagging
*Neighborhood pages are a JOKE–they don’t accurately pull in the neighborhoods at all, they pull in real estate company blogs for other parts of town.
*Even though obituaries are one of the most read pages; and even though they say they want comments to improve–the places to put in comments or to read the obituaries are tucked away.
*The reporters are good but there are so few of them for the amount of work, and I can’t figure out why all of the stories are so short
*And I agree, so little use of the visual space
Why is the print so big? Why are there so few photos? Why is it so hard to tell who wrote the articles?
They need a *curator* or a *librarian* or two, or three, or four
*Why don’t they look at sites that really work for the users????

Okay, I’m overstating things slightly for the sake of provocation; I assume you use Twitter more than you use an RSS reader, and that’s totally valid. I suppose news outlets who want to offer more than their headlines on Twitter should probably use multiple Twitter accounts for different purposes. Any thoughts on that solution?

Good comments. I agree with you about people’s yearning less for information and more for prioritization of information.

People like a good curator and editor to highlight what’s absolutely essential, quirky, or appealing.

1) identify a lead or “cover” story of importance for the day

2) use a concise, accurate headline format that explains the story (like the BBC online, which uses only 4-6 words in a headline and each word is critical for understanding the story)

3) include a brief description after each headline about the story (like Salon.com does in its “river”) – so I know what I’m about to read.

4) add categories to each story so you know if its news, political, sports, arts and entertainment, opinion, lifestyle, health, etc.

5) Actually use their Twitter account to deliver headlines instead of retweets and opinions.

Seems to me that the key to Dearing’s vision of “reflect[ing] the entire community and not just the news” will be building AnnArbor.com in such a way that the homepage’s news content will be used in lots of different ways, and integrated with the social/customizable features of this and other sites. Twitter’s home page isn’t the only way people consume Twitter content, and presumably AnnArbor.com’s homepage won’t be the only way to consume AnnArbor.com content. If the simplicity of AnnArbor.com’s front-page layout boosts its news feed’s usability, sweet.

But there’s a big downside.

As Dan and Patricia say above, and as Ben emphasizes in his post, this bloggy format sacrifices the prioritization/filtering function that traditional newspaper sites have tried to offer. AnnArbor.com offers a totally different function, and people like Patricia will be disappointed.

In general, I agree with Patricia: readers yearn less for information than for the prioritization of information. If that’s true, AnnArbor.com may turn out to be an interesting mistake.

When every story and blog posting is just as important as the next, then nothing is important.

Only a few items can be listed on the home page without having you click to an older page. I don’t want to have to ignore the multiple — and there are many of these — posts about food, upcoming entertainment shows, and somebody’s posting of their neighborhood bbq — to find out that city hall burned down four hours ago.

But I guess that’s the idea when you fire your reporters and rely on free copy from the “community.”

The audience for each of those posts has to be small. The river of information just washes me downstream — and out of annarbor.com.

It will continue evolving. Seeing AnnArbor.com adapt and use what is a proven product may not be newsworthy, but at least it’s an intelligent move from an otherwise not-so-smart industry.

Cause frankly – what is this really? It’s a slightly cleaned up version of a blog’s design and I think we’ll find – when they release their traffic stats, that its effective. Big newspaper websites have distorted what it means to be a ‘news site’. There is a reason the blog format was invented for the web – it works.