A 'guest' review of the Miami Herald site

Whilst I was staying in Miami for the IA Summit, I couldn't help notice the building for the Miami Herald. It is near the waterfront on Bayside, and looms out at you as you cross the bridge from Miami Beach to 'Downtown'. So I thought, since I was a guest in their city, maybe they could do a guest spot in my newspaper website reviews. I had a quick look around the site to see what sort of online presence the Miami Herald has.

First impressions

The paper seems to be putting a lot of content online, and I found the homepage to be rather cluttered. It was also really long as well, involving a lot of scrolling before you could get an overview of just how much content there was.

Individual story pages were more focused, and it was nice to see a very prominent placement of the journalists contact details. From a social bookmarking point of view, individual story pages could be submitted to Digg and del.icio.us. There was also a link to send a story via the AIM instant messaging service, which is something I don't think you see very much on news sites on our side of the Atlantic.

Navigation

The use of the left-hand navigation on the site was very interesting. On the homepage it focused very much on the different sections of the newspaper, and online services. At the story page level, however, the navigation is much more focused on related and popular stories.

The sectional navigation is provided by a primary navigation strip across the top of the page, and a rather over-wieldy site map at the foot of the page. This can be opened and closed using some plus/minus controls.

RSS feeds

The Miami Herald publishes a very wide range of RSS feeds, promoting 177 different RSS feeds from the site. These include feeds based on topic, author, and geographical area. Plus you can get the Obituaries in RSS as well, which always seems to be a popular newspaper feature.

Front pages

There was one feature that I found most perplexing on the site. In the navigation, under 'Online features' there is a link labelled "Today's front page". To me, that label implies that when you click on it you will get some sort of digital representation of the day's printed front page. However, that isn't the case. What you get is a web page that features only one online story. Presumably this is the story that was on the print edition front page, but there is nothing in this context on the web to confirm that. To me, if it isn't an online replica of the 'front page', then it is just the 'top story'.

Webcams

In the UK newspapers have tended to move away from having 'landmark' buildings, but I loved the fact that I was only drawn to research this piece because the Miami Herald still resides in a 'landmark' building, branded with the paper's identity down the side. They take advantage of that by offering a couple of webcam views from their offices across the Biscayne Bay.

Well, I guess if you've got it, flaunt it.

Posted by Martin Belam, May 8, 2008
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