Knight Ridder Homogenizes Its Local News Web Sites
The Online Journalism Review reports that Knight Ridder has rolled out a new, standard look and feel for many of its newspapers' web sites, generating criticism on a number of fronts. Knight Ridder operates sites like SiliconValley.com and Philly.com, which now look more alike than different.
Doc Searls made some extremely critical comments, calling the change Death by Content Management. KR took some well designed web sites with unique architectures and distinct audiences, broke every link to other web sites, and rolled out something new which looks like the lowest common denominator of what they had previously.
This criticism makes us wonder why we haven't heard much about Advance Internet's properties like NJ.com, Syracuse.com, and Cleveland.com? All of these sites have a common look and feel. All of them definitely leave something to be desired. Maybe this is what we have to look forward to from all of the "old time media companies".