There’s no good way to have a conversation on Tumblr, is there? This will have to suffice
I almost exclusively read on my laptop using readability. While still not laid out, and still a “template,” it makes reading online SO much more pleasant. Once you start you can’t go back.
It is an interesting point, though. We have always laid out the pages of our magazines and newspapers using templates as a guide - customizing almost everything. Why don’t we do more of that online?
There is no good reason as far as I can tell.
There’s no technological barrier. Creating a template that allowed for more freedom in design, I think, would be remarkably easy. It’s the practicality of it. Maintaining that kind of site would require skilled producers, an art director, designer(s), front-end developer(s), editors who understood what is and is not feasible. It would certainly be a far more complex publishing process than is typical.
As I mentioned earlier, I believe the biggest barrier is financial. A site like this would just cost more to upkeep than your typical editorial startup. But I think there is a good business there. Slow down your production cycle, create high expectations and therefore real demand around your content and sell advertisers on the content’s high quality and the audience’s high avg. time on site and I think you have a winning formula.
Today, a very familiar thing happened.
I’m reading a story about Tina Brown by Peter Stevenson, the former executive editor of The New York Observer. He was born to write this piece. It does not disappoint. (“Under a black suit, she wore a white shirt unbuttoned enough to display the cleavage that inspired Private Eye to dub her a ‘buxom hackette’ when she was 25.” Nice.) And yet, I’m left wondering, what does this piece look like in the magazine? It’s not that I want to see a pdf (yuck!) of the magazine version or that I’m yearning for the tactile comfort of the printed page. It’s that I’m bored. Not by the content, mind you, but by the design. It’s a 5,000-word profile that probably involved weeks, if not months of work, and cost the Times a nice chunk of change to produce, yet it’s squeezed into the same template as practically every other piece of content on nytimes.com. (Witness my incredibly helpful side-by-side comparison of the Stevenson article with a 750-word piece about Michael Bloomberg.)
The why is fairly obvious—ease of production and speed, advertising constraints, cost, competing functionalities, etc. Templates serve an incredibly important function in online publishing. It’s an integral part of any website that hopes to keep up with a daily news cycle. And there’s nothing wrong with the template per se. It’s the philosophy around templates that is wrong. Templates need to be more flexible to allow for the kind of creativity we have come to expect in print and, at this point, online.
How can we expect readers to treat online content with the same amount of respect and reverence as we do print content, if we don’t even try to treat it with the same amount of attention to detail online as we do in print. It’s time editorial sites start experimenting with more flexible templates.
This is not an issue of time, mind you. At this point, a trained front-end developer, knowledgeable in CSS, could lay out a custom article design as quickly as someone trained in InDesign.
It’s an issue of money. (Isn’t it always?) Publishers don’t want to pay for the personnel. They are expensive—just like their print counterparts. They are also worried about the return on investment, which is entirely fair. Why invest in more personnel when even the most optimistic advertising projections can’t cover the cost? The reason is that this is how you increase the value of your product.
I have been a fan of Dustin Curtis for some time. It’s been a while, however, since I visited his website. (He doesn’t publish regularly. Maybe every couple of months or so.) But I try to make a point to every so often and I was not disappointed by my most recent trip, which yielded a two-part series on quotes by accidental presidents.
To put it bluntly, Dustin Curtis knows how to design the fuck out of the written word—online. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.
It’s especially exciting for someone like myself who sees in Curtis’ work a way forward. What if editorial sites slowed down their publishing cycles and paid more attention to design? What if each story was a uniquely designed, self-contained editorial morsel of perfection? Is this sustainable? I think so.
I don’t know Dustin Curtis, otherwise I would ask him directly, but I’m very curious what his traffic is like. Do these stories have peaks? What’s average time spent on each article? I would just love to get my hands on his analytics.
Am I the only one who read this as a very tacit condemnation of the Times? Read this again:
The Daily is a near perfect realization of exactly the idea that occurs to print editors every single time they get their hands on digital media for the first time, regardless of what the underlying technology might be: “Let’s make it just like what we know so well in print.”
How does Vinh know this? Because he lived it. This is clearly written by someone who spent a lot of time designing the web iteration of a print product along side people with a similar mindset to those who are now running The Daily. He may be openly attacking the Murdoch-owned product, but you can’t help but wonder if he’s secretly delivering a kick to his old employer.
Design of Jay-Z’s new lifestyle site Life+Times flaunts its lack of headlines beautifully, but does it do it at the expense of its content? The site is so designed that it overwhelms the content, making it almost feel like an afterthought, a thing meant to service the elegance of the design and nothing else.
The more I think about it though, the more I like that the design forces the reader to spend time exploring the site. It doesn’t give up the goods immediately. While this may not be good for SEO or bounce rates, it rates high on boldness, which is Jay-Z’s stock and trade.
And I can only imagine the time and energy it took to get this thing to work and look right. Definitely a heavy lift.
[Thanks Food Is the New Rock for the inadvertent tip.]
Seems like a lot of people (including David Carr) are talking about Pop Dust, a new site from the former editor of Billboard about pop music for people who really care about pop music. What I like about the site, photos of Justin Bieber in nerd glasses notwithstanding of course, is its use of illustration. Similar to what’s done on Capital, the site intends on rotating into their background new illustrations. It’s a neat little idea that adds some variability and depth to the site design. Whether or not the site’s content can do the same, I’ll leave to founder Craig Marks:
“Music is generally covered in two ways on the Web. Bands either play live or they show up in dreadfully dull interviews. Both of those things are pretty played out,” Mr. Marks said. “Hopefully, the magazine experience I have taught me a few tricks about packaging stuff about this kind of music that will give people another look at the people who make it.’”
Good luck!
I don’t know Buster Benson. I found his site via a post about one of his creations, 750 Words, which I believe powers at least some of the data found on the site. It’s an entertaining mix of personalized and dynamically updated maps, line charts, pie charts, graphs, photo feeds, lists, etc. It’s achieves the twofold purpose of showing you who Benson is and what he’s capable of as a developer. It’s the perfect introduction.
Dude has had it up to here with infographics.
What he really seems to be saying: do it with an NYT budget or don’t bother, because you’re not really telling the story better.
Brier seems to be conflating BAD infographics with ALL infographics. What’s interesting is that he’s more willing to admit that he’s wrong—”Where I struggle with this a little, is that it feels fairly contradictory to some of the stuff I wrote in ‘Everything is Media’, specifically the bit about people too often focusing on content instead of the medium”—rather than suggest the creators of the so-called “jumped the shark” infographic have failed to fully digest his point.
For example, the infographic that pushes him over the edge is this one on Metafilter, a static .png probably created in Photoshop, Illustrator or—gasp!—InDesign. It’s not particularly web friendly as its dimensions are better suited to a tabloid sized poster—ie a newspaper broadsheet—and it has zero interactivity. Where’s the use of the creative use of CSS, CSS3, HTML5, javascript, AJAX … hell, even Flash? How does this embrace the medium? It doesn’t—and that’s what Brier should ultimately be angry about.
(Source: futurejournalismproject)
Last we checked in with Newsday.com, it had been 3 months since they launched their paywall and they had 35 subscribers. In the intervening year, the site’s traffic has been more than halved from 1.6 million to 700,000 unique visitors. In the discussion of paywalls, their’s is the forgotten one, much like the tabloid is to the News and the Post. Should it be? I wonder. It’s almost as if the paywall sapped what relevance Newsday had—even to the topic of paywalls.
All I know is that the new design gives the reader no insight into how the paper expects to attract more pay subscribers—aside from the simple fact that it’s much easier to read than its previous iteration, whose navy blue background was a non-starter.
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)
