Customer Disservice Online   

Newspapers must make their Web sites easier to navigate.

AIRLINES AND NEWS operations have more in common than you might think. Airlines specialize in customer disservice, and the media are pretty good at it, too.
Think of how wonderful the airlines are at annoying us. The more desperate we are to get someplace, the worse they treat us. They charge us more and then put us in the middle seat.
Airlines are able to get away with this because they have something few businesses have: dynamic pricing. It's the ability to raise or lower the price of an airline ticket based on any criterion they wish to use: tiny blips in demand, proximity to takeoff, the number of carriers serving a location, time of year, time of day and so on. Regardless of the price you pay, you'll be crammed into a seat designed for a midget and served a practically inedible snack (if you're served anything at all).
The airlines get away with this because they can. They all operate with the same kind of customer disservice, and we put up with it because we have to.
Media companies are sometimes just as bad. How easy do the news media make it to use their products, in print or online? How many boring, poorly written stories do we cram in the paper or on the Web because they're "important," and the readers "need to know" about them? How often in your newsroom do you see people actually walk away from ringing telephones?
As a judge in our industry's major contests for online newspapers, the EPpy Awards from Editor & Publisher and the Digital Edge Awards from the Newspaper Association of America, I see dozens of media companies practicing customer disservice on a grand scale. The products, even the best of them, are just plain hard to use.
Take the New York Times on the Web. I wanted to see if I could find staff e-mail addresses on the site. It took me about 10 minutes and six clicks to arrive at a page that said: "Want to contact someone specific at The New York Times or The Times on the Web? Send a blank message to staff@nytimes.com for an automated response containing the e-mail addresses of New York Times staff members who have made them available to the public." Now, that's helpful. Undaunted, I continued to scroll down and finally found a listing of 32 Web staff members, six of whom have links to their e-mail addresses.
Latimes.com can be just as frustrating. You will find lots of letters to the editor on the Opinion pages, but you won't find a word about how to send a letter to the editor on those same pages. You'll have to click on "Help" to find the information.
When I happened to be in Washington, D.C., recently, I thought I'd check the Post's classifieds for a Toyota MR2, a two-seat sports car first made in the mid-1980s. I was shocked to find that the print classifieds alphabetize makes, but not models. In other words, about 200 Camrys, Corollas and other Toyotas are helter-skelter over several columns. So, I decided I'd search washingtonpost.com's classifieds for MR2s. Would you believe I couldn't find a way to just browse the MR2 ads? The site insisted I enter a Zip code to search for cars within various distances from my home. I never did find any.
And as a recent visitor to Des Moines, I thought I'd check the Register's site for restaurant reviews. Again, I was thwarted by software that was hard to use. I could search for reviews, but only by restaurant name. There was no option to search all the reviews by location or type of food. When I did find a list of the restaurant reviews available on the site, it was in reverse chronological order, not alphabetical. Hardly helpful.
There was a time when media outlets could afford to be like this, like the airlines. Most had virtual monopolies based on geography. But that time has passed. The Internet is changing our business even more quickly than it is the airlines'. We still have to choose an airline if we want to fly, but our customers no longer have to choose a local newspaper to get news, at least not most kinds of news.
Airlines are embracing the Net to save money. They let us make our own reservations without talking to a person they must pay, and they sell seats on priceline.com that otherwise would go unfilled.
The news media are not yet as savvy. Sure, most newspaper Web sites let people enter classified ads online, but how many allow them to submit obituaries or wedding announcements? How many accept Little League scores? How many auction off ad space that otherwise will end up being filled with house ads?
It's time. Use the Web to end customer disservice. The products will be better for it, and so will the readers.