News websites hit an evolutionary dead end

The news website is dying. It’s about time, too: Websites are terrible at distributing news.

When the internet was fresh and new, it made a lot of sense for media houses to experiment with this new technology. My former employer, the Mail & Guardian, is rightly proud that it was the first-ever African news organization to set up a website, way back in 1994. Since then, almost every newspaper in the world has followed suit.

But the experiment has failed. Let us count the ways in this handy listicle (perhaps the only type of story that does actually make sense on a website).

One: News websites are ugly. Most of them. Has anyone ever printed out the homepage of a news website to hang on their wall? Do you remember news websites in the same way that you remember iconic newspaper front pages or magazine covers? No and no.

Two: News websites require readers to make far too many decisions. Let’s take The Guardian’s homepage, which is one of the cleanest out there. I just counted: As of 11 p.m. Central African Time on December 3, there were 211 separate places to click. You want me, the reader — already overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available to me — to absorb, process, and then decide between 211 different choices? This is an abrogation of our responsibility as journalists in the 21st century. We’re supposed to help people to cut through the noise, not add to it. The format of a news website prevents us from doing that job.

Three: We’ve normalized “cookies,” but don’t let the innocence of this term deceive you. Almost every news website on the planet puts behavior tracking software onto their readers’ devices, and sells the information gathered to shady, entirely unaccountable third-party companies. This may be standard practice on the internet — but it shouldn’t be. And it especially shouldn’t be for a news organization attempting to build a relationship of trust with a reader.

Four: News websites live and die by traffic, and traffic is determined by the needs of algorithms, not people. Anyone who has worked in a modern newsroom knows that this reality informs headline writing, caption writing, story placement, and sometimes even the angle of a story. There’s an argument to be made that search engine optimization is one of the most insidious forms of editorial interference ever invented. And we are letting it happen, in return for — what, exactly? Certainly not a major payday.

Five: We all know the economics of a news website don’t make any sense. I can’t think of a single example from the African continent of a legitimate news organization turning a profit on the strength of its website alone. If your primary product is a news website, the history of modern journalism suggests that it is almost certain to fail — no matter how good the quality of the journalism that appears on it.

So let it fail. Try something different. There are alternatives.

Take Pambazuko, a Tanzanian newspaper that celebrated its 100th edition in early December. It has a website and social media presence, but its main product is a PDF designed to look like a newspaper — a “newspaper without the paper” — that gets distributed via WhatsApp. That PDF has, in two short years, made it Tanzania’s most widely read independent news outlet, with 25,000 subscribers and an estimated circulation in the hundreds of thousands. Given the country’s authoritarian bent, and long hostility towards independent media, this is an extraordinary accomplishment — and a testament to the power of their particular model of digital journalism.

Pambazuko’s stunning growth supports a hypothesis that the newspaper for which I work, The Continent, has been testing: Newspapers are not dead. They just need to evolve. But news websites are an evolutionary dead end, because they misunderstand the fundamental appeal of a good newspaper: a curated, tightly edited, high-quality, beautifully designed, completable package of news.

There’s no good reason for news websites to exist. The next great digital media product will capture all of the best qualities of an old-fashioned newspaper, and more; it will be divorced from algorithms, search engine optimization, the 24-hour news cycle, and the whims of erratic billionaires. Pambazuko may or may not have cracked it already — they’re still searching for a sustainability model — but at least they’re trying. Not enough media houses, especially better-resourced ones, can say the same.