The paper’s new
design delivers high technology, keeping a local community feel.
By Jon Steely / Special to The Malibu Times
Following a successful Web site launch in the late 1990s, The Malibu Times has recently introduced a new Web site design and upgrade. The Web site has been restructured to offer a simpler, more effective way to access information, and designed to make content easily visible to its users.
An improved homepage, featuring sharp pictures of Malibu, offers news content while highlighting services. New features include streaming video, reader posted photo galleries and an interactive community calendar, along with redesigned news, sports, entertainment, editorial and classified pages. Regarding the latter, people can now post a classified online at any time, day or night, rather than waiting to speak to a salesperson during office hours. Readers can also post comments about stories and other areas of the Web site, as well as submit letters to the editor online. Upgraded video and multimedia features are high contrast and easy for visitors to use and look at, while at-a-glance Malibu weather and stock quotes conveniently provide generally sought-after information.
“There is enhanced coverage,” Arnold York, publisher of The Malibu Times, said. “We are definitely going broader and deeper. It’s a very exciting time for us and it’s going to keep growing.”
Statistics show that the online version of The Malibu Times has drawn a readership of 2,000 visitors per day, or an average of 60,000 visitors per month. Additionally, it draws close to 7,000 page views per day, or 200,000 page views per month (rach visitor to the site reads approximately three to four pages.)
York also highlighted the local community feeling the Web site offers: “We can cover Malibu events with a specificity that the general media does not have the same access to. We know the turf.”
Keeping up with technology
With an increasing number of people getting their news online, the times have changed, affecting both the newspapers as well as the readers, for better and for worse.
“Almost 90 percent of the technology savvy population get their news online, and take news feeds directly into their homepages and e-mail applications,” Thom King, president of Sequinet Internet Technology in Malibu, said. “You can pick and choose what you want to read and watch when you want to read and watch it, rather than having to wait for a TV news story to come around or having to buy and go through a newspaper or magazine.”
Though newspapers that have embraced current technology fare better than those who have not adapted, daily newspapers are suffering as online newspaper services continue attracting readers, particularly young people geared toward immediacy.
“By the time you read a story in the dailies, it’s already old news because everybody has already seen it online,” York said, adding, “younger people today tend to be more online and less likely to read a newspaper.”
Ken Waters, professor of communication at Pepperdine University, said smaller dailies and weeklies are still strong despite the online competition. “Though circulation and ad revenue is down for larger and mid-level daily newspapers,” Waters said, “smaller dailies are not affected because they give their readers what they can’t get anywhere else, detailed coverage of local news, of things that affect them locally, things like local school district issues and city council meetings.”
“Overall,” Waters continued, “we still don’t know if the rise of online news services is just a pendulum swing or if the future of daily newspapers is really in jeopardy. While dailies may have to rethink their content and place within our changing climate, online papers [which typically do not charge for their content] are challenged with having to be able to make money from advertising on the Web as compared to advertising in the daily newspapers.”
Thom King said there are some negative impacts to consumers of online content. “The downside, is that people are becoming less social,” King said. “There is a decline in the art of conversation and social interaction, a lesser amount of sensitivity and discussion of current events.”
Professor Waters agreed, stating, “Society in general seems to be less concerned with dialogue.”
He further warns readers of the disadvantages of Internet news sources. “Anyone can put anything on the Web,” Waters said. “Special interest groups can make very credible looking Web sites for their magazines and not necessarily be putting up truthful content. Quasi-news, news mixed with opinion, can be presented as news. The danger is when we believe anything that we read online just because it is online, just because it looks like the truth.”
With standards of journalism tending to be higher for actual newspapers than they are for many online news sources, readers of daily papers generally feel more assured that what they have read is an accurate representation of the truth.
Michael Murrie, professor of journalism at Pepperdine University, introduces the idea that the growing popularity of online news sources actually pushes the daily newspapers to fire on all cylinders. “The web creates pressure for newspapers and magazines to be on constant deadline. They need to respond to breaking news just as a radio or television station does. Readers are expecting this immediacy more and more.”
This immediacy is something The Malibu Times has responded to, especially with last year’s fires, when many times the paper’s online site was the only source of continual, updated information.
As Laura Tate, editor of the paper, said, “The fire[s] caused us to become a daily online paper-it pushed us into that realm…”