Wire feeds in the wrong time zone
I’ve already picked on Knight Ridder recently, but I just discovered another problem with their centralized content management.
Many of the Knight Ridder sites carry a certain AP feed that I assume is centralized. The trouble is that the timestamps are also centralized. Papers in the Eastern time zone display timestamps in “PDT” (or probably PST by the time you read this). Some examples:
- The State (Columbia, S.C.)
- The Tallahassee Democrat (Tallahassee, Fla.)
- The Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.)
Other sites use a Reuters feed, in which the timestamps are in Eastern time, regardless of where the newspaper is based:
- The American News (Aberdeen, S.D.; Central time)
- The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.; Pacific time)
Programming a separate version of these wire service pages for each time zone Knight Ridder serves would be a piece of cake. They should be ashamed of themselves for using time zones outside of each newspaper’s geographic area, confusing readers and diminishing their local brand identity.
Update October 26, 2002, 11:58 pm: Those sites I listed as using the PDT AP feed are now apparently using the EDT Reuters feed on their front pages, although the links I gave above to inside pages still show the AP feed. Perhaps Knight Ridder changed all of its sites over from AP to Reuters between early afternoon, when I first noted this issue and copied down some URLs, and this evening, when I wrote the blog entry?