Johnson & Johnson : Confusing amounts of news

Unrefined centralisation of news makes for an unusable resource.

The Site

Johnson & Johnson, the US healthcare giant, has a News section consisting solely of press releases issued by the company and its many subsidiaries. The News introduction page explains that these are divided into Press Releases & Statements, which are from the past 12 months, and a News Archive. An RSS feed is also provided.

Recent and archived releases are stored in reverse chronological order (most recent first), with navigation at the bottom of the screen based on page numbers. Ten releases are displayed per page. There are 265 releases from the past year on 27 pages and 385 in the archive, on 39 pages, going back to 1998, though only a handful are from before 2002. There are no filters to allow the releases to be sorted in other ways. The advanced search engine can cover News only, though there is no indication of this in the section introduction.

The Takeaway

Johnson & Johnson is an unusual company with a highly decentralised structure. It is therefore impressive that it has pulled together news releases from its many units in one place. Unfortunately, it has failed to follow this up by making the resource usable.

A decision has been made to limit the number of releases to 10 a page, presumably to limit scrolling. However, this means journalists have to click through dozens of links in the hope of finding what they want – scanning long pages would be much easier. The lack of filters is another problem. While the ability to search the News section only is a potential lifeline for the baffled, it is strange that the section’s introduction page makes no mention of it. A little user-centred thinking would make so much difference.

First published on 14 June, 2007