MSNBC.com was my primary news source for 12 years. Last year it became NBCNEWS.com. It was the best formatted and organized news web site on the web. I typically was on there three or four times a day checking the headlines.
Yesterday they went to this new format. It’s just a disorganized mess. Huge pictures with one line in the middle. WTH have they done? It just scrolls and scrolls with these huge ass pictures. Such wasted space for a tiny link and finding or comprehending what stories are published is difficult.
Does anyone like or understand this new web site format? Is there any way to just get a list of the links? What if I turned off flash?
I am not a fan. It looks like they are going for the tiled look that you find with mobile devices and Windows 8. That said, it’s just really hard to find anything. I liked that news was grouped into sections. It was easy to find what you wanted or wanted to ignore. Not so much now.
reuters is nicely laid out. It’s organized into sections. A few pictures but they aren’t huge like nbcnews. I rely on reuters for international news and some US news.
I agree it sucks, and I also agree that the old site wasn’t broke (at least on a computer). I have gone to it over the past couple days mostly out of habit. Now that I hate the layout, once I remember that I hate it, habit broken. Now I gotta work on finding another news source I like.
Ugh. I can’t stand big honking images with minimal tag lines; I don’t even like mobile apps that use that format. It’s just much easier to get an overview of the important headlines with a good headline and a smaller image.
Reuters does have a better presentation (both on the web site and their mobile apps). BBC News works well on their site, but their mobile app tends toward the image-grid setup, though it’s somewhat customizable. Yahoo News (slag them if you will) does at least have a concise presentation of headlines and thumbnails, as does Google News.
I understand the trend toward mobile-friendly tile/grid presentations, but I don’t understand why they’re always so damn big. It’s much easier to get a sense of the story and its importance or interest factor if I can tell what it’s about from a headline and maybe a line or two summary. (Yahoo News actually has a Digest app on the iTunes store that does this quite successfully.)
NBC, formerly msnbc, was my go-to news site just because I liked the comics and sudoku. They got rid of those, so I used other news sites. Now that they’ve uglified their webpage and made it much less usable, I won’t go there anymore. I’ll delete the bookmark when I get round to it.
I sent them a note asking them to go back to the old format, or at least make it so I could use the slightly less annoying drop-down menu as a default home page.
It is like a news site for four-year-olds. I kept expecting to hear different sound effects as I clicked on the pretty pictures. The Sochi fireworks go “boom!” The hijacker’s plane goes “whooosh!” To America, Snowden goes “Thhpppttt!”
I tried to look at one article. It was the one about Leno’s farewell. Clicked on the video, and a little spinny thing came up and never went away. Total waste. Never again.
It just scrolls and scrolls with these huge ass pictures. Such wasted space for a tiny link and finding or comprehending what stories are published is difficult.