Pitchfork launched a redesign last week. The reaction has been mixed. Some have picked on the new, subtler logo, the exclusive use of Helvetica, and the boxiness of the new layout. One person tweeted, “Not wild about the Pitchfork redesign. I give it a 6.8.” (Credit to Billboard for finding that gem.)
Sadly for Pitchfork, a site I visit often, all of these observations have merit, though they miss the real reason why people’s reactions are so meh: from the users standpoint, the new design does not have a clear raison d’etre.
To put it another way, is the content better served by the new design? To determine such a thing is near impossible, although I guess traffic would be a good benchmark. Reactionary blog posts are probably not.
Personally, I would have liked to have seen a more radical approach to structure. Pitchfork, like many sites who are juggling not only a lot of content, but a lot of different kinds of content, has not yet found a elegant way of seamlessly promoting that content. Their approach, which is more functional than it is engaging, is to dump each content type into its own box and then to order the boxes according to editorial priority—reviews, news, new music, video, respectively. They are more interested in making it easy for the user to find the kind of content they’re looking for, rather then telling the user what content they should be looking for. And while the latter may not sound like an appealing idea in the Internet age, it is a fundamental service provided by any editorial product.
So I guess I’m saying the Pitchfork redesign represents a minor cop out. I say minor because this is an incredibly difficult challenge, both from a design and an editorial perspective, and to be fair, the new design is visually appealing. Album art, photography and video are given more “room to breathe.” The site’s navigation is somewhat improved, especially on interior pages, where the site is doing a better job of promoting related content, creating an especially vicious rabbit hole.
Luckily, the content is so good, I’m sure they’re going to have plenty of more time to figure it out.
Daily Dot interested in covering Reddit, Digg, 4Chan, not so interested in letting users share their content on them
The Daily Dot, a digital “newspaper” that will cover social media communities—think Reddit, Digg, 4Chan—like metro beats, is a great idea. It’s easy to see where the traffic will come from: Not only will the locals clamor to see their names “in print,” but the outsiders, intimidated yet intrigued by sites like 4Chan, will stop by to gawk at the exotic products of these communities’ cultivated insularity.
It’s a win-win, except for one small thing: They are neither interested in making it easy to share their content on anything but Twitter and Facebook, nor are they interested in tracking its popularity on other social media sites.
The question is why. Now, I think there may actually be a reason for this—aside from your usual startup hiccup. These guys know these communities. They know how their users operate. I don’t think they saw it as a conflict of interest or playing favorites. That would be taking the newspaper metaphor a bit too far. I think there’s a deeper explanation for it: Those social media buttons just don’t work.
We have had clients tell us that only Twitter and Facebook integration has been successful in driving significant traffic to the site and while its nice to include the Reddit and Digg icons, they do nothing. If that is the case, then it would make sense that the editors of the Daily Dot thought that the inclusion of those buttons would undermine their credibility, as those buttons demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how those communities function. Am I warm?
So what does that mean to a site whose sole purpose is to cover these communities? Truthfully, the most reasonable explanation is that this is a startup and they just haven’t gotten around to it. But even that explanation hints at a real issue: if it’s something that can be easily omitted, how important is this kind of social media integration to an editorial product?
The new Nieman Journalism Lab is confident you will scroll down
Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab launched a redesign today, again demonstrating their wisdom regarding the interwebs. Everyone knows the last Monday in August is National Soft Launch Day. (Oh, I just made that up? Doesn’t matter. Nobody is reading this, just like nobody will notice that the Twitter bar at the top of NJL’s homepage is one pixel off. It will be fixed by the time the Uniques get back from drinking Mai Tais at some Cancun Club Med. Didn’t I just mention it’s the last week in August?)
To be honest, that one pixel—which is probably unique to my browser (hey njl, it’s firefox v. 6)—is the only proof I could find that suggests this is indeed a soft launch. Kudos! It’s a sharp, well thought out redesign. Don’t trust me. You can take a quick tour with director Joshua Benton.
So what does their redesign tell us about their vision of the future of journalism?
* Your users will scroll down. The new NJL features no less than 8 stories above the fold on its homepage. All its other offerings, the newly minted Fuego, Encyclo, its app and other Nieman spin-offs, are further down the page.
* More “magezine-y” design means more of a focus on features.
* Pick a pretty font for your headlines.
* Double down on Wordpress.
* Double down on Twitter.
Andy Rutledge's nytimes.com designs are pretty, but some of his thoughts about news sites are ugly
Why does Andy Rutledge have to make it so hard to like his designs? His suggestions for the Times are elegant, but they are a little misguided. Websites need to be more readable and usable and to a degree, Rutledge presents some elegant solutions to those problems. But he goes too far in making his point. Here are some mistaken assumptions about the news industry:
1) The news industry has abandoned actual journalism. That’s just silly. If that were true, if all of the content was bullshit, what would be the point of redesigning it?
2) The newspaper’s “promotional strategy” and “pandering” is “thoughtless.” Actually, they have put a lot of thought into it. Perhaps it’s executed poorly, but news sites make a lot of money from ads and simply suggesting, “Hey, why don’t you move to subscription model?” isn’t a viable option for a lot of sites. The question really should be: Is there a better way of incorporating advertising into news sites?
3) Most Popular is worthless. People like to know what stories are trending. Dismissing it as social media makes no sense. Like Cameron writes, social media should be integrated into news content. How other people are experiencing the news can be as powerful a reading experience as the news itself.
This all being said. I agree with Rutledge’s point. High quality content deserves high quality design. I would just go one step further. While Rutledge’s design solutions are easier to read and use, I don’t know if they would inspire readers to open their wallets. In order for there to be a subscription based model, I think design has to go even further, treating each piece of content as a discrete design challenge. This means dumping templates. But I would limit this idea to magazine-style content, not daily news content.
Andy Rutledge:
Regarding content strategy and mechanism, today’s ‘news’ is rife with irrelevancies and distractions. Part of this is due to the news industry’s abandonment of actual journalism, but much of it is due to thoughtless promotional strategy and pathetic pandering. I suggest that digital news acquire a responsible and more usable approach.
Andy’s arguments and mockups are both very well-conceived — I would love to see online journalism (all of it, not just NYT) head in this direction. His design concepts are fabulous.
I do believe, however, there should be an affordance for social components in news media, as the context of others’ opinions as to what is news and what isn’t, and what is more important news for that matter, can be helpful in sifting through the daily deluge of reported information. Not that peers are more discerning than editors, mind you, but that their voices (ours, that is) should be allowed to influence society’s understanding of the world around us.
Hey, old friend. New design looks great. Definite improvement on the old one. But what happened to the navigation menu at the top of the site? I want to navigate. It’s a little cheeky to make me scroll down to find your silos, verticals, buckets, whathaveyou, etc. Is that the point?
Not only is this interesting as a matter of historical record, but design, too. Notice how LITTLE the page changes day to day. The main photo and the text changes, but visually, it’s the same structure and layout every day. Kinda boring, no? Remarkably, the only major changes to the homepage are not due to large breaking stories, but ads. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the flexible homepage.
Time-lapsing the New York Times Home Page
Phillip Mendonça-Vieira ran an errant cron job that ended up taking two screenshots of the New York Times home page every hour from September 2010 to July 2011. The fortunate result of the mistake: 12,000 screenshots of what the Times felt important for its home page.
Phillip writes that most publications don’t save their frontpage layout data and if the printed newspaper ceases to exist, society will lose key historical snapshots of the every day.
Via Phillip:
This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.
Notable moments: Chilean miners at 0:39, Arab Spring at 3:38 and Japanese Tsunami at 4:54
Why is this your homepage, HopStop?
The popular wayfinding site launched a redesign this week. It’s cleaner, better organized and more attractive then its predecessor. One thing baffles me, though. Why is the HopStop directions form not on the homepage? Why make users make that extra click?
The only reason I can fathom is precisely the one that makes the decision so irksome—they want that extra click. At what cost, though? If I had never used HopStop before and I landed on their site, I would be completely unaware of what makes the site so unique. At first glance, it looks like any other local travel site—and that doesn’t bode well for traffic. They could have very easily integrated the directions form into the homepage, employing the standard basic vs. advanced search features you see on airline sites.
Let’s, for argument’s sake, say that they were trying to bolster their editorial content, give it more prominence by transforming the homepage to focus on it. Why not put it on the Directions page, too. I can only assume that is the most popular page on the site, yet there is absolutely zero of this new content on that page. The site does not try to leverage the tool’s popularity into more clicks.
And that’s what the issue boils down to. I wonder if the people who run the site conflated the poplarity of the tool with the popularity of the url. That is to say, HopStop.com is not popular because it’s HopStop.com; it’s popular because it housed an incredibly powerful and useful tool. Leaving it off the homepage may hurt them in the long run.
Bill Simmons hasn’t put up a podcast since Thursday of last week. It’s an odd time for the arguably the world’s most popular sports columnist to go quiet. We’re right smack dab in the middle of the NBA Finals and the man who made his name on writing about basketball is curiously absent. Now, I know why.
He was launching a website.
Grantland went live today, complete with a (very) long introduction from Simmons, its editor. He explains its goals thusly:
The first was to find writers we liked and let them do their thing. The second was to find sponsors we liked and integrate them within the site — so readers didn’t have to pay for content, and also, so we didn’t have to gravitate toward quantity over quality just to chase page views. The third was to take advantage of a little extra creative leeway for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. And the fourth was to hire the right blend of people — mostly young, mostly up-and-comers, all good people with good ideas who aren’t afraid to share them.
All admirable. Good luck to you as you figure this all out, Simmons.
Bill, if I may? One suggestion. Tighten that homepage. Your first story doesn’t show up until 660 px down the page—that’s almost below the fold territory. That photo at the top is great, but it’s static (I assume). It’s dead air and it will suck the life out of your homepage. In your next iteration (and I’m sure there will be many), tighten up that header and get those stories firmly above the fold where they belong.
It’s incredible how wrong one story can be, especially when coming from a source as Web savvy as The Atlantic.
Reading this story, they would have you believe that the art of headline writing is dying due to SEO (search engine optimization aka print’s favorite bogeyman). This could not be further from the truth. To understand why, you have to understand one fundamental thing about headlines online. For every story, there are at least two headlines: The headline that is attached to the story and the headline that is used to promote the story on a site’s indices (ie homepage or section pages). The former is the only one that must be SEO friendly. The latter does not.
Since clicks are still every sites’ currency, copywriters online have to write one headline that will sell the story to the search engines and one headline that will sell the story to human beings. Turns out, doing the latter is not so easy. For print people, think about it this way: Every headline on a homepage is a wood headline. Every headline needs to sell. On any given day, a newspaper has to write at most 3 headlines to compel someone to buy the paper at the newsstand. Online, you have to do it FOR EVERY STORY.
This is why headline writing online is far more cutthroat than in the paper. Forget writing SEO headlines. Anyone familiar with identifying proper nouns can do that. When you have to write a headline for a homepage that must compel someone to click, that must stand out from all the other headlines (not to mention photos, videos and ads) competing for their attention, this is what separates the pros from the wannabes. Ask these copywriters to spend a month managing a news website’s homepage and have them come back and see if they’re whistling the same tune.
(On a sidenote, it bothers me to read about copywriters complaining about Web editors rewriting their headlines. Somehow they forget that their puns were born out of necessity. Sometimes they only have 15 letters due to space constraints to promote a story and they have to use silly contractions or misspellings to make headlines work. Obviously online there are no space constraints. If Web editors did not edit these print-layout-specific headlines, it would be an embarrassment.)
So is good headline writing dying? No. Only headlines that involve self-indulgent puns that may make someone chuckle, but won’t make them click.
‘Google Doesn’t Laugh’: Saving Witty Headlines in the Age of SEO
If all online searches are literal, what happens to the headlines that involve a play on words? Are those headlines relegated to the print edition, where headline writers have a captive audience? Indeed, as newspapers embrace search engine optimization, and as young journalists are taught to value Google visibility above all else, many copy editors fear that funny headlines are quickly going the way of the classified ad.Read more at The Atlantic
Felix Salmon, after reading Columbia Journalism Review’s 143-page report, “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism.”
Salmon is right. For too long, editorial enterprises online have been dominated by an outmoded business model that has stunted the growth of the very products they are designed to support.
Banner ads are a crutch, a relic of a different medium. They can be profitable for some, but they are largely the domain of traffic giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Craiglist, AOL and Yahoo!
It’s time to move on.
Media companies have been beat at their own game. These internet and social media companies have created economies of scale that newspapers and magazines could never fathom decades ago and can never hope to rival.
This leaves 3 options to media companies who are trying to turn a profit online:
1) Try and leverage a parasitic relationship with the big boys a la Huffington Post. Just know you are going to have to play by their rules (SEO, link baiting, etc.) and the odds are against you.
2) Make content your loss leader. What you’re bringing them in the door for, well, that’s anyone’s guess.
3) Depart from the codified world of standard ad sizes. Create unique advertising opportunities based not solely in content, but in design and reader experience. Create a compelling, unique experience online (identifying what that is is basically the purpose of this tumblr) and not only will readers flock, advertisers will, too.
And what’s the great thing? You don’t have to choose just one! Mix and match.
