My Hometown Paper Takes a Dive

My hometown newspaper, the Argus Leader, needs to fire their designer. Last Autumn they latched on to a new marketing concept focusing on more local news and events leaving everything outside of the tri-state area (South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa) in the dust.

Their efforts failed miserably. The news is flat and their web site a disaster. As you can see, the layout is awful. Ads dominate, navigation is scattered, the brand is weak, content elements look like advertisement. The User needs to invest a lot of attention to understand what is what. In short: Fire the designer.

All the years I traveled the globe, their online edition used to be my main point of reference for news back home. It was a great site with good news articles. They changed all of that and now it's almost worthless for news.

Their printed paper also failed and is not worth spending two quarters on. It's packed full of adverts and is absent of substance news. It's as if they live in a bubble and don't realize there is a whole world out there chucked full of interesting things to share.

The paper was founded by our local hero Al Neuharth (the founder of USA Today - another poorly designed news site). It's currently owned by Gannett which suggests adequate funding for decent, usable design.

Reading great articles about the future of newsprint, there is a wealth of opportunity for the Argus to still provide great news, increase their customer satisfaction, as well as increase profits. If they give me the chance, I could turn around their site and please both the shareholders and the customers.