A very public suicide
Gondo throws their web site into the recycle bin
How to become irrelevant without even trying
-- John Patten, 04/13/08
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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The layoffs included their domain name
Last month, the Venice Gondolier Sun scrapped their domain name, www.venicegondolier.com, in favor of consolidating with their master corporation, Sun Newspapers. The web consolidation came on the heels of a massive layoff within the Gondo news building in Venice. The small newspaper operation let go of some 15 employees at the beginning of the year, including long-time crime reporter, Tommy McIntyre.

The results of the layoffs and web consolidation, from a reader's perspective, have been nothing short of disastrous. Gone is the huge back catalog of online stories going back into the late 1990s, leaving a huge trail across the internet of home town litter and detritus: dead links on other web sites to stories that no longer exist on the now-dead Gondo site. Links to older stories that can be found on the likes of on Yahoo!, MSN Search, Google, AOL Search, and a host of other search engines are now all dead links, hints of stories that might have some relevance to a reader's ongoing research.

Trying to link to new stories is equally impossible in some cases. Thanks to overlapping and duplicated file names within the new site's architecture, coded links used to link to a given story change overnight. An example of that is a story about porta-potties that ran on the front of the Gondo's section of the Sun Newspapers site. Within 24 hours, the Gondo's web site had reassigned the page link code to a story about downtown merchants working together on a youth-run store, duplicating the article's assigned number code within the site. Thus a link to a story that works one day won't always link to the same story on the next day.

You don't need to be very cyber-savvy to come to the conclusion that dumbness is ruling their web site development team when programming like that is occurring. It's not just bad programming that needs to be straightened out, that happens at all web sites. With the new Gondo web site comes a fundamental misunderstanding of their core online audience and the total lack of knowledge that their online audience is running away.

Compounding the problems even more is the organizations mix 'n match approach to technology. The new web site uses ASP (Active Server Pages), a Microsoft platform built into Windows-based servers. Meanwhile, the Gondolier's offices are filled with cantankerously ancient and and hopelessly outdated Apple computers that often can't render newer tech web pages (last year, I actually had to teach one of their reporters how to use his proprietary Apple web browser, current version for 2002, to view content on Venice Florida! dot com's message board).

Gondo goes down
For the almost the entire month of March and into the first week of April, news stories from the Gondo's web site were entirely offline. Clicking on any link to a news story only brought up a copy of the front page of the site imbedded in the framework of the front page of the site, a sort-of mirror within a mirror effect. The actual story could never be found. No explanation was ever offered, no "Sorry about our mess" disclaimer. Nothing.

Suddenly last week, the web site started working... sort of. The whole site is still buggier than a butterfly farm, but every once in a while you can find a link to a story that actually connects to the right story.

Now if you want news of what is going on across the county line in the distant town of Port Charlotte, no problem. That part of the site works great, so great that Port Charlotte's news stories now pass for the lead stories on the Gondo's web site. Meanwhile, links to news of Venice are buried at the bottom of the page. Sometimes the Venice links even work.

Calls to the Gondo office in Venice led to no insights into what was going on. The web site is run out of Port Charlotte with no communication with the Venice office. When asked what was going on with the web site, a Gondo staffer replied that he didn't know and wouldn't know as there are no lines of communication between the local print edition in Venice and the online version published in Port Charlotte.

Meanwhile, Venice Florida! dot com has fielded around 10 to 15 calls a week since the Gondo's internet collapse started, all asking what is going on with the Gondo's web site. The answer given is "We don't know and they aren't saying."

Here's an idea -- sell the content that you don't have
Then there is the paid-for content. There is apparently a plan here on the part of Sun Newspapers, but it appears to be so ill-timed that it may throw the Gondolier Sun into permanent irrelevancy.

The New York Times recently abandoned the idea of paid for content in their back catalog of stories. The program wasn't working, people weren't buying, and as a result, they weren't clicking. While the NYT-owned Herald-Tribune has yet to follow suit (their older content is still only available for purchase at an outrageous $2.95 per article), the Gondo is struggling for a paid content model that will work. Readers can buy the full newspaper online via an online subscription, but given all the free content available elsewhere, the vast majority of web readers will surf away.

Another compounding problem here is that due to layoffs, the newspaper has been gone so low budget in news that the online content is hardly worth paying for. Consistent misfires in understanding their readers, in assaying public opinion, and in understanding the fundamentals of how government actually works in their local coverage, causes one to wonder how much longer the Gondolier can actually survive.

Examples: a story in today's print edition (that was omitted from free online viewing) bemoaned the fact that property owners outside the city are threatening to not annex into the city with several large tracts of land. The newspapers' editorial board apparently missed the point of the voter anger in last November's election -- that citizens have had enough of massive annexations.

In another recent article, this one about the rezoning of industrial land near the Venetian Golf & River Club, the Gondo reported that council had voted the rezoning into existence. In fact, council has yet to finalize the rezone. Council has so far only voted on the first reading of the ordinance, the actual passage of the rezone ordinance is still somewhat up in the air.

There ought to be a law
While the Gondolier is entirely free to do whatever they wish with the content that they have developed over the years, that attitude is alienating them nearly completely from the publication's readers who view the content as part of their personal history, a history that has been ripped away from them by the demise of the venicegondolier.com domain name and the destruction of the old web site.

That situation, combined with the web site's stone silence to the community on why they have made the changes and when anything will finally get fixed, is losing them readers every day.

Which is sort of OK with Venice Florida! dot com -- we've gone from 3,500 page views a day to around 8,000 since the Gondo started imploding online.

The Gondo is a valuable internet asset, their online catalog of stories was impressive. The loss of all of that online history in the back catalog of news stories is a huge loss to the community. It's not a crime for the Gondo to pull their content from years back, but it ought to be.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.