Please evaluate and critique www.triblocal.com.
Triblocal is a publication sponsored by The Chicago Tribune. 42 communities in the southern and western suburbs each have a Triblocal Web site. Anyone can register for Triblocal.com and post their own photos, stories or event listings directly on the site for their town.
Each week, a staff of Chicago Tribune reporters select the best postings to Triblocal.com and publish those postings in a weekly newspaper. The "user-generated" content is supplemented with original reporting and photography by the Chicago Tribune reporters.
Currently there are 10 newspapers serving the 42 communities, with plans to almost double that number by the year's end. Triblocal first launched in August 2007 with two newspapers serving 6 towns.
In your critique, please analyze the design of Triblocal.com. What do you like? What don't you like? What is confusing? What could be better?
Also take a look at the kind of postings Triblocal receives from users. I will bring copies of the printed edition of Triblocal to class on Wednesday so you can see what the final product looks like.
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Overall, I think that TribLocal.com is a pretty good site. I like the concept of getting the community involved with the news that they’re making. Almost everyone likes to see their pictures, words, and accomplishments published, so it’s a nice way to display user generated content. There were actually a lot of great pictures up there. Also, this site probably provides good insight for the Tribune about what types of local coverage the public might be looking for (based on the number of views varying stories get).
ReplyDeleteOnce you click through to a suburb, I like the idea of the Local Resources links. It’s a mini-directory of addresses and phone numbers that you might be looking for. The event calendar is a good idea as well. If someone used the site frequently and they were just looking for something to do, they would be able to scan through (or search) the calendar to find an event.
One criticism I have is regarding the home page. When you first visit the site, it’s slightly confusing to figure out the navigation. If someone is not as familiar with how to get around the site, they might give up before they actually get to any content (aside from the slide show on the home page). I think it’s a detriment to not have the list of topics on the home page – that way people might at least click through to that if their particular suburb isn’t listed in the two drop-down menus.
Another downside is that a lot of the posted stories end up being press releases from local businesses and such. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it takes away from the “news” side of it and makes me think of it more as a “local information” type of site.
Obviously, it would also probably benefit TribLocal.com if the northern suburbs were accounted for as well. Then it could be a cohesive suburban life site.
I really liked the three fold focus on this Web site - share your news, post your photos and publicize your events - really giving the community three different ways to get their news out there. I liked the drop-down South and West neighborhoods list - but where were the northern suburbs? Shouldn't the site include all of them - or does this site have a more defined area?
ReplyDeleteI thought the sections were very well organized, and the photo slide shows on each town's homepage really gave me a feel for the area. The "Using the Site" tab was also helpful.
The events calendar was also helpful - if you have nothing to do in your area on a certain night, you can check out this Web site for a bevy of new ideas. I also saw other interesting sections that I have not seen in other newspapers - Pets, Teens, and Faith don't really seem to have a large presence at the daily papers here in Chicago, but I like that this local Web site is giving a voice to them as well.
ReplyDeleteThings I love about Triblocal:
ReplyDeleteYou can see how many hits each post has had. I can kind of see how if I were looking for an event and only 3 people saw the post, it might not be very packed. It's also nice to be able to see who is a major player in a community. After scrolling down 1, 0, 3 hits, I see one that has been viewed almost 2000 times. Orland Park realtor. Figures. :0)
Another great thing is that there is a seniors and teens sections. Both segments of the population who are possibly just "getting into" the internet and may not have or be able to afford an online subscription. It also might encourage teenagers to post to the site instead of relying on Facebook and MySpace for everything.
Faith and Pets: Thank you for weeding out the dog, hamster, and church stories from my news. I'm serious. Thank you!
The design is very column-listed based. There are 7 photos in a slideshow and not one person of color! There isn't much diversity in the towns Triblocal covers either. In fact, alot of it is white-flight news - especially the southwest suburbs. Maybe that should be considered.
So yeah, interesting sections, nice design, just needs to stretch out a little more into the areas and stop being so white-people-oriented.
Overall, I think that this website is great. It has a simple design, which makes it easy for the reader to navigate around the page. It lists each individual community/town that allows one to search through a specific area that they may be interested in. Once you have clicked on the specific tonw, there is a bar on the side that will navigate the reader to specific topics within that certain town.
ReplyDeleteThe website is great in the fact that it allows citizens to get involved anf possibly have their story put into the newspaper. It gets more people involved in the news and more people interested in journalism. This site also lets them view news that may relate more on a personal level since it is happening right int heir own neighborhood.
Another cool feature is that it shows the number os times the certain story was looked at, so the author can keep track of how many times his/her story was looked at. The reader can also click a date on the calender and all the events for that specific day will come up on the page.
To wrap things up, it is a good way for the major papers to connect locally get get more people invovled within their community on a journalistic level. It is overall a very well designed website, that gets straight to the point and has very little ads, which makes it nice when you come to the site to get your news not commercial ads.
The design on triblocal.com is very clean and user-friendly. I like how after the particular suburb is selected, the left side bar has the the "Specific Topics, Tools, and Site Resources pertaining to it.
ReplyDeleteThe feature gallery on each home page gives the reader and insight into the suburb. The photographs are crisp and clear, which I appreciate more because they were done by members of the community.
The fact that the Tribune makes an extra effort to connect with surrounding suburbs is something I admire. The newspaper is centered around the city and the metropolitan area, but is still the major print news source for several other local cities.
The "Upcoming Events" is offered on each town's home page with events that are geared towards the family. Overall, I think that triblocal.com is a very unique and well-thought through site. The information is clearly organized and easy to read. The site is not just for all the surrounding suburbs, but strictly designated for each particular town.
I agree with previous comment-posters about liking the formatting of the Triblocal website as well as the graphics and the community appeal. The features like the calendar and the story hit counter were helpful, and it is good to get community members engaged in their own news. However, I found it really difficult to find myself personally interested in any of the stories since I'm not a member of these communities. It's hard to imagine why anyone would find some of these stories interesting, but I guess that's what hyper local is all about.
ReplyDeleteI sort of wish that the stories could be written by journalists instead of community members. I'm in a community journalism class right now, and we talk a lot about how community journalists are really important to people who live in the communities, and over time they develop good relationships with everyone and play an important role. Imagine being a suburban reporter and then a big, scandalous story breaks. You're much more likely to get information and quotes from your sources than a reporter from a detached, bigger news outlet just dropping in because something more widely interesting happened.
That being said, I think it's interesting to consider what it means when you hand over the hyper local reporting responsibility to community members. In a way, it's providing them with an outlet to produce their own news and publish it, but in another way it's saying that journalists don't care what's happening in the communities. I don't think that journalists are too busy to look into writing these stories on their own, and journalism would probably excite people more if journalists still bothered to take the time to engage and show interest in small communities.
I think that the overall layout of Triblocal.com is great. It is really simple and the colors distinguish it from the Chicago Tribune, probably done on purpose.
ReplyDeletePhotos are also really well done, which I appreciate a lot.
Also- I really like the different categories that are on the sidebar. They are really specific without being to specific and really separate the different topics.
I like the idea of having user driven content and then printing it and adding Tribune journalist content as well but I am really curious to see how it actually looks printed out. I also think its interesting that there not only is local people submitting work but that you can find some Triblocal.com reports content on the site as well.
Over all I think its a well put together website and I am interested in seeing the print version in the next class.
It’s a well-known fact that people will never be pleased. In our class discussions we are constantly criticizing sites for throwing too much information at us, so now I almost feel bad saying I feel like there isn’t enough. This site was slightly difficult for me to navigate, but that can be almost entirely credited to the fact that I am not from anywhere around Chicago—this site is definitely geared towards that specific demographic, which I think is neat. It just would make a lot more sense to me if I knew these towns, schools, etc. That might all sound like a criticism, but I really like the site. Here is citizen journalism as it should be, and here is a way for people in a community to remain connected.
ReplyDeleteI like the layout—technically this site is a blog, but it really doesn’t feel like the regular blog layout (which is a good thing, I think). The calendar, the police and fire dept. contact info, the garage sales tab, the photos: these things really make this site well-rounded for a person in their particular community. Besides the bar across the top, ads are very discreet, which is good because that is something we have criticized a lot of other sites for.
One thing that I thought was really odd was that, in the town’s page I looked at, I couldn’t find one story that had users had commented on (unless they don’t show up if you aren’t registered?) There was the obvious ‘comments’ section below the stories, but never any comments. I thought this was odd because this seems like a completely user-based site/blog, which would normally make it even more of an environment to respond and comment than normal.
I like the site overall, but I am especially interested to see the print version, to see what is chosen as most important, etc.
The homepage of Triblocal.com is nice and organized with a lively feel because of the transitioning photos and stories (in the sidebar). The scrollbar option to select your town ("South"/"West") is a great accessible feature for anyone to figure out and use. In addition, there is a sense of interaction between the user and site instead of feeling like the news is just "given to you." Users can really feel like they have something to offer.
ReplyDeleteTriblocal and its user-generated content is a great way for communities and individuals to share their stories and photos. Once a town is selected, the user is provided with numerous options to choose from - it's definitely not lacking in its information it offers. The "Featured Gallery" is also a great way to make the stories come to life and seem more interactive. However, once a town is selected I think it can get a little overwhelming in the amount of options and small print that comes along with the town's homepage. It should be categorized in a more broader fashion which will eliminate to amount of content which is given initially on these homepages.
Overall, I think this site is a wonderful way for communities to come together and share in what makes each of them unique. In addition, others have the opportunity to see what is going on around the area.
At first glance I realized how small the home page was. I thought right away that this would take away from the site but I was wrong. Since the home page is limited in size it directs the viewer’s eyes toward the areas of the site that are most important. The most important of these areas is the built in search engine that lists areas throughout Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. This is such a great feature because instead of typing in you area of interest you can scroll down a list of both south and west towns and select what you want easily.
ReplyDeleteThe advertisements on this site are very limited and this is something that internet surfers are always looking for when at a site. The site is simple enough that you can find anything that comes to your mind. There is one bad thing about this site and this is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of news accumulated on this site as of yet. It seems that it is a new news site and doesn’t have the largest database of stories hat one could wish for.
I like the fact that multi media predominantly photos are used to give the site a more lively feeling. The site also backs up its credibility well by putting the words, “Site sponsored by the Chicago Tribune” at the top of the web page. This gives readers a since of security when reading stories because the site is associated with a prominent Chicago newspaper. Most of all I like how everyday people can post their stories and photos which is a sign of effective citizen journalism. The site is new and lacking in the content area but with time it should gain more recognition and become larger than it is at this point.
I felt like triblocal was fairly easy to navigate through. I liked how there is one large picture at the top of the site and a slideshow to choose from beneath that, rather than pictures scattered all over the page. The site seemed very well organized and user friendly, I feel like it is a site I would use often if my hometown were included in this. I feel like the advertisements were well placed. It didn’t seem like there were a lot of advertisements, and the ones that I did see were right at the top and tucked away down in the corner. That is definitely a nice change from some of the sites I’m used to and the ones we’ve been looking at in class. I actually had to look for the ads this time around. I don’t know if there is much that I would change about the site. It seems to accomplish it’s purpose very well, which is to obtain news from various sources in various areas. Things seem very nicely put and with no advertisements to really dig through, everything is easily accessible.
ReplyDeleteTriblocal has a very clean above the fold look, almost to a fault. Whereas a number of the news sites we've critiqued threw too much information at us, triblocal has very little on its homepage. I suppose for a site of this nature, however, this might be exactly the point.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to having the front page wholly devoid of ads, it's vea very simple design. The front page has one main article, one quote, a photo slideshow, a pull-down bar to select your town, and a little info on how to contribute. For a site so focused on citizen journalism, this is really all that's needed.
The pages for each individual town are equally simple and easy-to-navigate. There's photos, stories, and an event calender.
Overall, I like the site's ease of use for people who may want information about their own town.
I love the idea behind the Triblocal site. Bringing citizens ideas to the forefront and allowing citizens to post interesting stories is a very innovative idea. I feel that since we live around a metropolitan area, most of the stories going on that actually affect people in suburbs, get ignored by the media. Its nice to know their is a hub where people can seek out what is going on within their own community.
ReplyDeleteI understand why the site is organized the way it is. Since every community is being represented, they should all get their own page, but I was not in favor of using drop down bars as the prominent way to navigate through the site, especially the bland bars, which reminded me of the ones you would use when filling out a digital application. I would have enjoyed if more attractive navigation options were installed, so that each destination looked appealing, and was not just black type.
Once inside the individual destinations I enjoyed the content. One thing is was wondering while browsing, was how many original submissions do they receive? Are the submissions coming form the same people month after month, where some communities are only represented by one or two people?
The major thing that I was disappointed to see was how the northern suburbs were not represented. I found it hard to really enjoy the content within the pages because I had only heard of a handful of the communities featured.
Instantly I was grabbed by the website’s logo. I was expecting, since this is a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune, for the logo to purloin the Tribune’s. It gives the site its own voice, although there is a mention of the Chicago Tribune in the upper right hand corner, but it serves its purpose to give the site credibility, as well. But come on, there is quote by LeRoy Brown, Valley View School District, that is inexcusable. There are two problems with the quote: 1) The font and color looks childish and done by an amateur, as if someone just learned how to encode words onto a website and this was their remedial effort. 2) The quote itself is a bit ambiguous and even if it was not, it is a bit redundant and irrelevant. When I think of quotes, I think of them to be thoughtful, stimulating regardless the context. In summation, remove that quote! I like the slideshow, though. It is a bit fast for my taste, I would suggest to slow it down a bit. There are some good photos and, even though I am not a fan of local news, it is charming. I know a lot of my classmates liked how www.chicagobreakingnews.com had an intuitive way to submit stories, I would say the same for www.triblocal.com, as well. I like the big fonts and encouragement to “get involved!” I am not sure if these pictures have a story attached to them, but I think if they do, that would be beneficial to have them link the reader to the article; either that or a link to more pictures of the event. I noticed that the site does not have much clutter, either. Interestingly enough, it only has a link to one article, a comforting change from the countless of links available on the other sites we critiqued.
ReplyDeleteA quintessential site for people of the community! I really like the look of triblocal.com. It was very clear and easy to read, with good spacing, and lots of pictures, which was nice. I also really liked the colour scheme, which may seem inconsequential but it’s a real turn-off to have my eyes assaulted by bright colours.
ReplyDeleteWhat really sets this website apart, in my opinion, is the organization. Every page was easy to navigate and full of relevant information. All the media was quick to load, and there was plenty of it. The sidebar (I love it!) was surprisingly comprehensive. Each city had a lot of information, so it definitely was not boring or repetitive.
Triblocal.com is the simplest page we've critiqued so far. It is user friendly and easy to read. The slides of the highlights of the day tell the reader what is currently going on different communities. I realised the site is also built to encourage citizen journalism for the areas around Chicago. This is a good thing in that it provides reporters with newsworthy leads that they can go out and get extensive coverage on.
ReplyDeleteI was a bit disappointed that it only towns in the suburbs are represented on the website, but I realized that some of these areas are actually small communities that sometimes get overlooked except when something major like murder occurs.
Great website and made for the ordinary citizen, even the ones that are technologically challenged.
The first thing that stood out for me with triblocal.com was that it was very, very simple. But its simplicity did not give the website any good qualities. At first, the rotating pictures stood out to me and i liked them. But when i started looking for descriptions of the pictures, i could not find them. I wanted to know the who, what, where, when and why,of the pictures but i was denied that. I wasn't even able to click on the pictures to see what they related to. If i could say anything positive about that section of the website it would be that the photos were really good.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the rotating story headlines to the left of the pictures was not bad. They were there long enough for me to read the headline and the lede and the stories were interesting to me, particularly the ones about the one year anniversary of the Lane Bryant shooting.
The best aspect of the website was the section for local residents to post their own stories and photos. I thought that that really represented what the name of the website. It really gave it the local feel. In addition, i thought that the website became a lot more user friendly and detailed after i selected a specific town to read up on. However, i did notice that the North side towns were not represented, which i found interesting. I thought that this might have something to do with the Pioneer Press.
The sections that each town was divided into, ie. the Business section, Entertainment section, were very useful in terms of helping me find what i was looking for. However, the website actually reminded me of its sponsor, the Chicago Tribune's chicagotribune.com's Community News section under the Local News segment. For the most part i don't think that i will come back to the website. Simply because i feel like i can find better websites out there.