MediaSavvy

What’s the difference between a newspaper’s front pages and its home page? Front pages are designed by committees of journalists using tried-and-true rules and home pages are designed by committees of journalists and business people who are making up the rules as they go.
It shows in the rottenness of the result.
Steve Outing’ latest column in E&P gels a lot of my concern. I don’t necessarily agree with Jay Small and Adrian Holovaty that news sites should be more like Google or that the front page shouldn’t look like an index to the news.
But we need some guidelines for how to build a news page.
Newspapers benefit from established rules that have been taught in high schools for generations. Because our medium is so new, we’re in the process of learning what works and what doesn’t.
Here are my issues with the way news sites are created today. I’m using the San Jose Mercury News home page as my poster child, because it’s one I know well. There are a lot of other papers who commit these sins.

• Too many brands: why is it that newspapers must create new brands for their sections (employment classifieds, auto classifieds, real estate classifieds, special content sites, local sports team section, entertainment section, etc.). Each brand is an ego exercise and requires the creation of a logo that must appear on the home page. These brands make it difficult for the reader to solve a problem (find a job, get the scores, check a showtime).
• Too many GIF’s: This is the child of too many brands, plus designers’ desire to overcontrol the display of the page. Of the 18 GIF’s I counted on the Mercury News home page, 2 were editorial, 3 were ads, and the remaining 13 were internal logos and house ads, many of them animated.
• Too much static information: A deep, well-organized nav bar makes it easy for readers to get where they’re going, but the Mercury News home page has nine separate static sections. Across the top: other Knight-Ridder Bay Area sites, “channels” (site sections), administrative links (help, contact, etc). On the left: search the site, “Looking for..”, “Our Site Tools”, win movie tickets, search personals. On the right: “Shopping/Services”, stock search, yellow pages search. Across the bottom: “Discover more on Bay Area.com”, and repeats of sections and administrative links.
• Too many nested tables: I didn’t count the tables, but there seem to be a lot of divisions on the page that indicate another table element.
• Too little news: About a third of the home page real estate is devoted to news, and a lot of that is white space.

I don’t agree that news sites should be more like Google’s home page. Google is designed to do one thing and its simplicity is a direct result of that need. News sites have multiple goals and those goals are more complex and information-intense than a web search.
Although I love white space, and it’s free on the Web, news lends itself to high-density information. Take a look at the simplicity and density of Macintouch, The Register, news.com, Google News, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, Arts & Letters Daily, The Economist. I’m not holding up any of the these an ideal just yet, but I believe that the high density of these pages makes them very useful.
My guidelines for designing a news page that works are:

• Use fewer GIF’s.
• Give your sections names (Entertainment), not brands (“Whasssup!”).
• Use fewer house ads and promotions, and make them count.
• Put all the navigation in one place.
• Limit animation to advertising.
• Have fewer fields of information.
• Keep the essential layout of these fields as identical as possible.
• Increase the real estate and density of news on the page.

This approach has the added advantage of making it more possible to use cascading style sheets for layout. This is an urgent need and I’m pleased to see it getting some attention.

MIN’s spin is that major media (newspaper) companies have done pretty well since the market bottomed out in 1987, gaining 230% in 15 years.
But on the same chart shows that the Dow gained 379% in the same period, showing that a chimp with a pellet gun could have invested his money more wisely than the executives of the top newspaper companies.

The Christain Science Monitor now offers RSS feeds of its news. This is the first major news source to put its entire content in RSS format. I doubt it will be the last.
I, like a lot of other people, have found that I can scan a lot more sites for interesting information using RSS feeds. The delivery and rendering of the text is faster and being able to see all the news in a consistent format makes it much easier to scan headlines and summaries.
I have also found that I have dropped RSS sources that don’t provide a summary of their stories. For sites that aren’t in the top tier, RSS is almost guaranteed to increase the number and quality of their readers. For top tier sites, they may get fewer browsers, but should be able to increase the loyalty and frequency of their most-loyal readers.

The Shifted Librarian does a much better job than I did of expressing why PDF is a dead end format. If you archive something in PDF, what are the chances you’ll be able to get at the underlying content 50 years from now? Roughly zero. XML, on the other hand, can always be parsed.
This archival failure is a major risk for most digital formats and will become an ongoing crisis, sort of like Y2K spread over the next fifty years.

AtNewYork.com interviews iVillage Chief Executive Doug McCormick.
He says “The underpinning of our philosophy is to take our brand name and extend it into other areas.”, but they have bought lots of non-iVillage brands: The Newborn Channel, Business Women’s Network, Lamaze Publishing. .
He claims to have dropped pop-up ads and that their readers use the Internet as a utility and a tool. But they’ve introduced “interquizzals” (I swear it!), interstitial ads in the quizzes that have been the staple of low-brow women’s books since Helen Gurley Brown.

MyWay is a portal without popups or banners. It focuses on text ads and has a prominent Google logo next to its search field.
Saul Hansell notes that it shares ownership with iWon, which he describes as “perhaps the most garish and crass of all the portals.” It’s notable that these guys also own Excite.com, once the second largest site on the net, destroyed by its management and VC’s in a fit of distribution/content integration and rich-media madness. MyWay is fallout from the CMGI meltdown.
It’s an interesting concept, but I’d like to see it executed by someone else.

Magazine publishers are unhappy that they sell their product so cheaply. The average subscription price of a magazine has dropped 17 percent in the last five years.`
The Times notes that publishers hate to lower their guaranteed circulations (the logical result of higher subscription prices) because it leads to lower ad rates.
From the article: ‘In Arizona, Ken Auletta, the media reporter for The New Yorker, was the host of a panel of chief executives who all made arguments decrying low subscription prices and suggesting that someone should do something about the problem sometime. “You all run big media companies,” he said. “You have the power to do it.’

Reuters’ recurring media revenue fell by eight per cent, due to web sites cancelling services such as news and information feeds.
This probably signals an adjustment in the online news business. General news is a commodity, and so are general news audiences. A lot of sites must be reconsidering paying for news feeds that are not perceived as exclusive.

Thanks to Jeremy Zawodny for bringing the term “flashturbation” to our attention.
I’ve never been a fan of Flash. It seems to have three uses: entertainment, information, and attention-getting. I don’t find most of the entertainment applications very appealing, it’s seldom used in any way that actually adds information, and about 95% of the time it’s used to get your attention (either in splash screens for corporate sites or in advertising). Finally, Flash production just increases the operating costs of most sites.
Always ask yourself: is that Flash really necessary?

US Mobile phone users aren’t interested in wireless internet service, according to the Yankee Group: 82 percent of respondents said they did not use wireless Internet service.
About half of the nonusers either didn’t want to do so or didn’t need too.
16 percent said it was too expensive. Other reasons: it was too complicated, too slow, or not available in respondents’ area.
Now, think about the billions invested in 3G spectrum and infrastructure. That money is never coming back.