THE Leveson Inquiry report has been criticised for not addressing the impact of the internet on the press, and the way it was published today was symptomatic of old-fashioned print publishing that doesn’t put user need at the centre, writes Martin Belam.
There were a lot of jokes on Twitter today that you could pay £250 to get the Leveson Inquiry report in print, or download it for free on the internet, which served as some kind of analogy for the state our newspapers find themselves in.
I think you could take that analogy a bit further — trying to read Leveson on the web might be free, but like a lot of news websites, there hasn’t been a great deal of thought put into the user experience.
Fair play to the Leveson Inquiry web team, when you went to the website this afternoon, downloading the report was probably the primary use case, and they did have prominent links on the homepage. Although given that the CMS is WordPress, quite why they had to be formatted as giant URLs I don’t know.
Picture: The Leveson Inquiry homepage this afternoon.
And those giant URLs don’t download the report. That would be ...
