So, Press Gazette relaunched last week. I actually saw the website in the first few hours, thanks to Martin Stabe's tweet, but I've been far too busy to write about it.
My first impression was generally positive. I liked the "classic yet somehow modern" new logo and the newsy feel of the site. The few technical glitches in the site that I noticed in the first 24 hours seem to have been largely ironed out by now. And it's generally clean, clear and easy to navigate around.
There are some major negatives, though. The lack of RSS feeds for the news is the obvious one. Most of the sites I follow regularly, I follow through RSS. Other news sites I have to remember to visit, and I suspect I'll only be visiting the Press Gazette site when a journo-blogger I follow links to it.
But what really galls me is, try as I might, I couldn't find a single reference to trade media in any of the sections.
If your stated aim is to broaden the appeal of the title to all journalists (the mag's new strap is "for all journalists"), completely excluding the area that the few hundred journalists in this building earn their crust in seems a rather dumb move. And RBI is far from the only large publisher churning out business to business publications and websites. A whole, and not insignificant part of the market, ignored. A whole possible subscriber base, forgotten.
While I'm sure that Press Gazette runs stories on trade media, managing not to have a single story on this area on the site at the time of a major relaunch hardly endears the struggling title to us trade hacks.
For all journalists. Apart from you dumb bastards in the trade press. Obviously.
Ditto the trades. Are they not "sexy" enough?
I also hear you on the RSS gripe. I don't have too much of an issue with going to the site, but without an RSS feed you're bound to miss bits.
But, maybe this might get around that??
http://twitter.com/pressgazette
Oh, that's useful. Thanks, Graham.
Lack of RSS? All the feeds are here:
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/RSS_home.asp
As a B2B journalist in a building full of other B2B journalists, I take your second point. But lack of B2Bs is also not really the case, eg:
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=37753
B2Bs' video efforts are also included here:
http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/fleetstreet/2007/05/24/expert-eye-the-new-vids-on-the-block/
It's not the first time I've heard this complaint, though. I've long thought our "magazines" section is a bit too broad. Splitting it into B2B and consumer sections might be something for us to look at.
Ah-ha. I completely missed that page of feeds, despite the fact I was looking for it. Any chance you could get the main feeds into the head area in the HTML, so that browsers will auto-detect them?
To be fair, the first article wasn't there when I posted, and the second only mentions trade in passing.
And yes, your "magazines" category probably covers a wider range of journalism than the national and regional newspapers categories added together… Splitting it into consumer mags and trade press would make much more sense.