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Last week, Gothamist would check NY1.com over and over again to see what the latest, breaking news about the transit strike was. And instead of NY1's usual site (as seen, left), it was stripped of any graphics or video links, just a text site - think about what websites looked like circa 1995. Luckily, the NY Times finds out what happened. It wasn't because NY1's servers suck, or because owner Time Warner is being tight with funding - it was because they decided to pare down the site. A NY1 spokesman said, "When we have a lot of visitors to the site, we actually switch over to a text version. People are mostly interested in the text information, and we're giving them that first and foremost." But people like pictures, too! Why can't we have it both ways!
NY1 Tries to Explain Its Website's Transit-Strike Look
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Crazy woman on the subway. This is too great not to post!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOCbij4lgl
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NY1's website is and always has been garbage. CBS2 and wnbc.com have much better sites for tracking breaking or developing news.
No kidding. Their website is one of the worst, if not THE worst, for local news in this market. Most other stations webcast their news feed live during a crisis. NY1 puts up a text only website.
Huh? The ny1.com site also went text-only before the last non-strike 2 years ago...and I remember that they claimed it was because of the server traffic. Maybe they're just too embarrassed to admit it now.
NY1.com is always a little slow. I'm sure it was to handle the traffic.
Paring down to a text version in the face of overly high traffic isn't that uncommon, but the need for it is. Think back to 9/11: a lot of sites like CNN and MSNBC did the same thing.
Yes, we like pictures, too: I don't know if anyone has considered a middle road where the front page is all text (or maybe with much more limited graphics), and links to pictures are provided.
What a crock of crap. I recall seeing the same "server traffic" messages on NY1's site that Tamouz is referring to. NY1 has gone 'barebones' on a slew of occasions including the upper west side wall collapse and during various manhole explosions. Bottom line - poor capacity planning.
That was a bad call on their part. The lack of any graphics or logos anywhere on their site actually lowered my impression of their coverage. Made them seem "new" to this.
i associate their text-only version with "serious" events.
In the age of CSS, there's just no excuse for poorly formatted webpages in the name of bandwidth. Banner ads take most of the bandwidth anyway, so just strip them out if you're having problems. It would make the pages more enjoyable anyway. The Times article claims the traffic spiked by a little over 200%. Temporarily dumping the banner ads would easily reduce load times by 70%.
thats bullshit- their stripped down site was because they obviously had server load issues with their other site. the fact that they would try to play this off as intentional just makes them look even worse.
holy god you guys are bored