Every so often, I go to The West Australian's website, to find or to follow up an interesting story. Why do I bother! Why would anyone bother to go the "The West's" website?! Just try it...
It is not "thewest" .com.au
In the address bar I type "thewest.com.au" -- just as I read it in the hardcopy newspaper. There's no such site. I am instantly transferred to, "http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/". What's that?! It's "Yahoo!7news" with "thewest.com.au" added to the top left corner of the screen. Oh well, let's pretend that the website is, in fact, somehow related to the newspaper...
Oh! look! a "search the west" option! I want to get some detailed information on drive trails which were selected by Stephen Scourfield, travel editor of The West, as being some of his favourite drives. The article ends with, "See detailed drive trails guide at thewest.com.au". So, I type "detailed drive trails guide" and press "search".
Search Results: No results found! That's not my exclamation mark. That's the displayed results of my search.
Try again.
The article headline is, "Six spectacular drives around WA", so I search for "six spectacular drives around WA".
Search Results: No results found!
Try yet again.
Search for "stephen scourfield". After all, he (allegedly) wrote the article. Two articles found. One is five days old, the other 19. Neither is relevant...
Really, the articles are from "5 days 19 hours 29 minutes ago" and "19 days 19 hours 27 minutes ago". Wow! "19 days 19 hours 27 minutes ago"! That's really useful, isn't it! The West Australian is a daily newspaper. News in a daily newspaper is either "today", or "old". Once news becomes "old", I don't care to carbon-date it to the exact minute... It's just old, yesterday's, last week's news... no longer current... You know, "old" news.
Oh well, time to try something different.
Forget trying to "search"
There's a tab labeled "travel". Sure, the article was in the "news" section of the paper. But I decide to buck the odds and click "travel".
Got it!
All sorts of stories -- travel related, mostly -- dated from February to today (May). Under the heading of "WA" is a photo plus teaser for a story on Aboriginal art, from four days ago. Okay, it's filed under "travel" because the artists live at Ringer Soak, 170km from Halls Creek. I've seen the turnoff: you think you're driving through the middle of nowhere, Ringer Soak is down an even rougher road, heading even further out.
But look! To the right of the big -- old news -- article is "Great drives of WA"! Dated today! Is this what I'm looking for?!?
Oh. Bugger. No.
The online article "Great drives of WA" -- dated today -- is not the same as "Six spectacular drives around WA" from this morning's paper. The online article does list ten drives -- none of which match this morning's article. Each drive name is a link to a separate article about that drive. Those articles are descriptive, I followed one, it had no practical information on the drive. The article did have a link to yet another site -- the front page of a commercial site -- which had no immediate information on the drive which started the trail of links.
Very lazy journalism
On The West's website, every "Drive" article was dated as today (4 May). Every article was originally published in a special liftout, on 6 March 2010. What an absolute rip-off! I give up trying to find a "detailed drive trails guide" for the drives.
Close the newspaper's website. It is a Yahoo site, with no useful relationship to the newspaper.
The West and thewest.com.au -- unrelated. Claims of more info online? Rubbish.
What a waste of effort.
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