Gawker’s new design reveals final trick: It can look a lot like the old design if it wants to.
Gawker has begun the long-awaited process of rolling out its redesign. Today the design popped up on i09, their future blog. Much has been written about the redesign: how it’s app-inspired, how it’s Twitter inspired, how it radicalizes the business of web publishing, how it’s a blog killer. What I have yet to read about—and what I did not fully realize until I visited i09 today—is the heavy burden it places on headlines.
Aside from the four featured stories on the homepage, the new Gawker design almost exclusively relies on headlines to sell its content. Bold? Yes. But what’s important to note is that this is nothing new. Headlines on websites—particularly those found on news websites with content heavy homepages—carry a very heavy load. For these types of sites, the difference between 10,000 pageviews can rest entirely on the quality of the headline and how well it sells a story.
Newspaper publishers are no strangers to this type of pressure. Newsstand sales, particularly for tabloid newspapers, hinge on front cover headlines. Lucky for them, they really only have to nail one headline—three at the most—to get your money. (See Capital New York’s daily The Front column by Tom McGeveran to see who does it best.) The interior page headlines, while important for tone and customer loyalty, are not nearly as vital to success on a daily basis as the headline on the wood. That’s why writing that headline is almost always left to the Editor-in-Chief or Managing Editor.
What if every headline carried that kind of weight? This is the case online. Each headline represents a potential click, a potential pageview that will ultimately contribute to your bottom line.
What’s remarkable is that many newspapers still foolishly think they can simply repurpose their print headlines online. The art of headline writing is shaped entirely by context: What art is adjacent? How much space is available for the headline? Who is going to read the headline? Is there a dek and/or bullet points? All of these questions have very specific answers which vary wildly from print to Web—not to mention the fact that the Web headline has the added pressure of search engine optimization (fodder for another post).
So where does this leave Gawker? Right smack in the middle of a headline bacchanal. Never have a string of words been so important to the act of publishing. Overwhelmed with information, consumers rely on headlines to find content quickly and concisely. Luckily, we are a generation of headline writers. (What are Tweets, if not headlines?) The new Gawker has absorbed this fact into its DNA. The only question remains is if Nick Denton and company have mastered the art of headline writing.
Man, I can remember a time when the Times would barely even deign to acknowledge Gawker’s existence.
Ha. Forget the Times. Try The New York Observer.
When spiders from Google or Bing or whatever pay sites a visit, they don’t send back oohs and ahs about Nick [Denton]’s enterprise content. They don’t glow with envy over how well it’s sorted and displayed for users and report that back to Google. They care only about what’s new. “What can I report back about the stream and flow?”
So live by the CPM, die by the CPM. Live by the RFP, die by the RFP.
Media companies secretly know this, but there’s still so much money attached that they’re paralyzed. So Nick is taking his company back in this direction, rather than continuing to explore how to monetize his audience, not his content. I think that’s a mistake.
”Terry Heaton responds to my earlier post and makes some strong points like this one:
“Display advertising is not, nor will it ever be, the driver of Web advertising. It’s designed for a one-to-many display, and the Web is a constant, real time two-way connection.”
I don’t however agree with him on all fronts, like when he asks rheotrically, “Does Twitter give a crap about how anything looks?”
No, Twitter does not. But the people who use Twitter and share urls and information do. Design and user experience are still valuable. To dismiss them because their current incarnations are failing advertisers and contributing to “banner blindness” is to have the same limited view of what’s possible as the tone deaf advertisers you’re helping.
I agree that “media people” are in love with their content, perhaps even blinded by it, especially those who come from a print background. They have protected their content and pandered to pageviews at the expense of innovation. They have neither engaged the medium on the level that you propose, which places priority on the back-end, nor have they honestly engaged in the process of designing a website that places the user first, that elevates the reading experience using the medium, rather than in spite of it.
While I understand better now your argument against what Nick Denton has done and appreciate your position, I still think there are elements of the new design that provoke, that are different enough from the traditional media outlets you disparage, that make Gawker something wholly separate from them—and perhaps more like Twitter than you think.
The reports of the death of blogs have been greatly exaggerated
“When I first read Nick Denton’s apologetic for moving away from the blog format for his Gawker empire, I thought I’d misread the whole thing… …Denton is a smart fellow, but I think he’s made a decision that will ultimately cost him, for in turning his whole online bloggy magazine consortium into one, giant traditional media display, he’s assumed the role of disrupted instead of disruptor… Most of the reasons Denton cites [for his redesign] relate not to news but to what the company feels is editorially important to display to everybody. It assumes that people come to their site once a day and need immediate guidance as to what’s important or what should be seen or viewed, as if they need and want such guidance. This is the same process traditional media has followed forever in crafting a finished product out of the stream that is news. The New York Times commented that this is the same thing the newspaper industry discovered over a century ago.”— Terry Heaton, Why Nick Denton is wrong, ThePoMoBlog
This quote leaves out the most important assumption Terry Heaton is making, which is this:
And what have readers done to this model? They’ve rejected it, but Nick thinks this is the way to go.
Is this true? When readers move from print to web, they’re rejecting hierarchy? That seems like a narrow argument. Perhaps it is one aspect of the shift, but it in no way reflects all successful news models on the web. Hierarchy is a critical part of news site design. Ignoring the fact that maybe Denton was being a little hyperbolic with his headline—since the reverse chronology still plays a vital role in the site’s design—the new design of Gawker is doing what every successful news site has done over the last decade: It is trying to find the right balance between hierarchy and the reverse chron.
The radical design shift is more a commentary on the maturation of Gawker than on web design and news dissemination at large. As a business model, I’m most intrigued by this notion of selling time slots versus selling pageviews. And I think the reader has the most to gain here. Denton is arguing for better content and a better reading experience. And this is what surprises me the most about the detractors. Are they really in favor of the opposite? Do they really believe a strict blogging format delivers the pinnacle of reading experience? I don’t.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
This is not another post about Gawker or Felix Salmon. I promise. It’s about something far more dry: weighing the comparative value of technology and content
Deep within the Felix Salmon piece on Gawker Media (Wait! Keep reading. I don’t dwell.) he explores the viability of Gawker as a technology company, focusing primarily on its content management system. While he dismisses the notion after a couple of paragraphs—noting the technical problems Gawker has had in the past—there is a lot of wisdom in the question itself: Should media companies like Gawker be as focused on technology as they are on content? Yes, absolutely.
While this may seem like an obvious point, it has yet to really catch on. Investing in technology is expensive and since the business of online publishing is still unproven, publishers are reticent to dump too much cash—at least enough to develop and support products like a content management system—into their websites.
When they first made the foray into publishing online, many media companies—especially those with print antecedents—adopted, developed and grew proprietary content management systems that are no longer supported. They invested millions upon millions in maintaining these systems, yet in the end, since the knowledge and technology is now obsolete, have little to show for it.
Media companies should be hotbeds of development and experimentation. Where else is there such a fertile ground of interesting content and imaginative people? The problem is that these companies rarely invest enough in development—and if they do, they rarely if ever structure their development departments so that they can sell their services or products to others.
It seems clear that there is as much value these days in development, if not more, as there is in content. Publishers should be stockpiling development talent. (Someone buy Instapaper and hire Marco Arment now!)
Which brings me to The Times, who started licensing Press Engine in August (something Salmon mentions). NYT seems to be one of the first major publishers to invest deeply in development and innovation with an eye to creating products. Am I right? Are there others? Who am I missing?
Felix Salmon on what Gawker’s Batty is up to next
Lots to chew over in the Felix Salmon piece on the Gawker split. Another part that stuck out to me was this:
Advertising which is so good it’s even more attractive to readers than the editorial content? Gawker Media got there at times, and that it did so is one of Batty’s crowning achievements. I look forward to his next venture, which will be partially bankrolled by Gawker Media, and which I suspect will go further down this path.
I, Mr. Salmon, am looking forward to it, as well.
“I suspect that Gawker Media’s pageview numbers will fall …—
Tired of Nick Denton? Sorry.
Say what you will about Gawker and Nick Denton—god knows they’ve gotten enough good and bad publicity over the last year to nauseate even the most casual media observer—but this post about the future of Gawker is the smartest dissection of a website’s traffic, information architecture, and purpose I have read by a publisher—perhaps ever.
What I respect most is that his argument for good business is an argument for improving reader experience and investing in reporting—the benchmarks of any good tabloid.
Only time will tell whether if right rail browse column will catch on. (It should. It’s smart. And if the last major redesign is any indication—in which Gawker adopted uniform sized thumbnails and tight teasers amongst other things—it will.) Nevertheless, it’s bold and boldness deserves respect—even if it’s given begrudgingly.
What is this, a teaser trailer? It’s a video dedicated to just one aspect of the redesigned site’s functionality. It’s neat, but … a trailer? Never has a redesign been more hyped than this one. I guess since it’s celebrating design that it’s one paradigm shift I can get behind, just don’t ask me to endorse their Prodigy meets Contra music choice.
I literally had a brief heart attack watching this video. Apparently the new Gawker will be fucking nerve-wracking.
Let’s assume Denton is right and the Web needs to be more like TV. Would the ultimate conclusion of that assumption be less content on the page? I’m not convinced.
It’s interesting. I happen to agree in part with both sentiments: the Web needs to think of itself more like TV and media websites shouldn’t be constrained by a pageview model that forces them to cram 3-4 ads on each page and a flurry of links. But I don’t know if one follows from the other.
Let’s take the TV argument. The web should more like TV in that it should strive to be its own medium. In the same way that TV content evolved away from being stagings of radio plays or shortened movies, the web has to evolve away from being a souped up newspaper or an interactive magazine. Web content has to strive to be different, not to accommodate more pageviews, but to make it more compelling, to make the experience of experiencing content online qualitatively different from that of reading a newspaper or watching a TV show.
For Denton, this means eliminating clutter and making Gawker more “magazine-like,” as Choire would argue. While I agree that these design goals would improve the online reading experience, I don’t think this is how web content becomes more like TV. The only way to do this is to start thinking about the medium and how one creates a compelling reading experience that is impossible to replicate by other sites and unique to medium. While I’m sure Gawker will continue to be successful, I doubt we’re going to see that out of them anytime soon.
