Critique of Web designs

Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame

Cole: The next site is defined as the rockhall.com, but in fact, it's been put together by a newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The site utilizes material from the newspaper as well as material from the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. So you have the Hall of Fame which is building material on a daily basis from interaction through the Web site. One of the leading pieces of the Web site is the top 500 rock 'n' roll songs of all time, which you get to vote on. So if your song isn't on the list, you vote, and maybe you can get it on the list. The site also has extensive music reviews from The Plain dealer. You have material the site is developing on its own, you have material that comes from the newspaper, and it is the newspaper's profile out in the community.

What I like to talk about when newspapers are trying to come on to the World-Wide Web is the notion of uniqueness. What I say to publishers is what about your newspaper is unique? Providing international, national, sports or business news does not make you unique on the World-Wide Web. There are lots of people who are providing that type of material. What can make you unique is something like the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. Not every city has a Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, but a lot of cities have unique little businesses. They will have a reporter who specializes in something. I like to talk about the notion of global grommets and The Daily Blatt. The Daily Blatt has a beat reporter who covers global grommets and knows more about grommets than anyone in the world. This is a wonderful illustration of a newspaper taking material it already has, taking the uniqueness, that is the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and building it into a very robust site that allows the newspaper to have a Web presence that isn't just shovelware, that isn't just moving material off the printed page and onto the World-Wide Web. What do you think, Rosalind?

Resnick: Well, David, I completely agree with you and that's why frankly I was stunned and amazed that you held up The Detroit News site before as something that people should emulate. The fact is that this is the future of regional newspapers on the Web. No matter how great the reporters are who are covering the city of Cleveland, nobody's going to stop at a Web site, besides a few people from Cleveland, to read news from The Cleveland Plain Dealer. On the other hand, with the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, there's millions of rock 'n' roll fans all over the world who are going to bookmark this site and who are going to keep coming back again and again. So that definitely is the future.

At the same time, I'm kind of concerned, David. I don't think it's enough for The Cleveland Plain Dealer simply to put it's own reviews on-line, no matter how good they may be. What they're going to find in the future is that to stay competitive, they're going to need to integrate content from all kinds of sources all over the Web, and they may need to add additional staff to keep this site strong and robust and worth coming back to. At the same time, I think that at a time when newsprint prices are going through the roof and threatening the very existence of print publishers, sites like these could very well turn into the tail that wags the dog.

Seybold: I think that you have to divide what newspapers like The Plain Dealer should be doing to two pieces. I think they need to be putting local news and classifieds and the things they do to serve their community on-line, for the very reason you just talked about. This is something different than that. It's important to understand how much the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame means to Cleveland. You know, you live there: people call it "the mistake by the lake." This is a town that needs the lift. It needs the identity of something special, and the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame can do that for the town. This is something the paper can do that leverages something unique to Cleveland. I think this is an interesting starting point, but it's just a starting point. If this is going to be what it could be, it should end up being the place where people who are interested in rock 'n' roll would go on the Net. Which means they have to link to everything else. This is the key to being on the Net. The key on the Net is links, and one of the things we haven't talked about yet is that that's what makes the Web really the Web -- linking to other things. Here's a perfect example of somebody who should be putting a lot of effort into linking to all the other resources. They should be using their editorial selection, not just for their own stuff, but for what links they choose to put in to link to other things around the world on the Web, so that you can go there, use it as your starting point, and explore the topic.

Cole: I don't disagree with you at all, Jonathan. We're in the infancy of this, and people are just beginning to learn how to do these sites. One of the interesting things that I find is that when we're talking about a word.com or a feed.mag, we're looking at people who are thinking very, very creatively about how to be on the World-Wide Web. But when we look at traditional print publications, we're seeing much less of that. I find that very, very scary.

Seybold: Yes. There are different kinds of things here. Feed.mag is a publication that sort of exists, and it's sort of a closed kind of thing. It's its own little universe. It's self referential, and what's in there relates to what has been in there. In dealing with something like rock 'n' roll, you're dealing with a much wider world. That requires you link to everything else you can find, and that your true editorial value-add is what you link to.

Cole: I don't disagree at all. I think you've got a good point, a very good point.

On to the next critique

Back to main web critique page