If I Had a Million

If I Had a Million Dollars - Fraters brought up a great point (and a nice plug) the other day. Let's talk about the Star/Tribune and Pioneer Press - and, by extension, nearly every other major newspaper site that I'm aware of.

Newspaper websites are designed to look, essentially, like online versions of newspapers. Like newspapers, they present their material - news, features, sports - in descending order of what the editor perceives as the reader's interest in the subject: The section A, above the fold story from the dead-tree edition is the top-center item on the website; the next story comes in below; the lead sports or special interest or politics or biz item comes in below that, depending on the news, or, more accurately, how the editorial staff decides to present the news.

Across the top of the webpage, there are menu links which are analogous to the major sections of the print edition. It makes sense - if you're used to operating in the world of print - which, naturally, is newspapers' only frame of reference. And in most cases, the newspapers' online editions are perfectly capable transliterations to the online world - almost as if the paper is being scanned and plopped on a web page (although the Strib apparently plans to make things even worse - creating, literally, a scan of the daily paper. You get all of the disadvantages of the print newspaper (linear, paginated access to stories, visual searching for pieces of content) and all the problems you get online (slow downloads, exacerbated by the size what has to be a big scanned or Java version of the paper).

In other words - they want to take a bad idea and make it even worse.

There are reasons why paper newspapers are organized the way they are, and have been for most of recent history. The traditional organization has hundreds of years' worth of "user testing", and it generally works fine - for print newspapers. It suits the technology involved - once ink is pressed onto paper, it's there, permanently. You can't reorganize it - although newspapers have certainly thought about it. About ten years ago, some newspapers (including the Strib) thought about, even experimented with, custom-designed newspapers - which would allow a subscriber to essentially get a custom newspaper delivered every morning. Want more metro and sports, less A-section and Variety? Voila, it's yours. Of course, while the logistics of gathering and storing all of that subscriber preference information has become dirt-cheap, the cost of actually producing, printing, assembling and correctly delivering potentially thousands of permutations of the basic newspaper (and the advertising without which it just makes no sense!) were daunting. (And the Star-Tribune seems to think that the way forward is

So how can an online newspaper be better than a print paper and the current incarnation of newspaper websites? What does technology have to offer the newspaper, besides a different layout challenge?

Here's a partial list:

• Immediacy: News doesn't have to be printed and distributed.
• Free Form Access: No pages to turn. No sections to keep track of. No paper layout conventions to follow, if you don't want to. Many ways to access a given piece of material - by browsing, drilling into any section you want, or searching.

But doing that with an online newspaper is not only relatively simple, it verges on the trivial today. Not only is the technology everywhere, but it's being user-tested constantly. It's the common blog - or rather, the uncommonly sophisticated weblog.

Here's a simplified mockup of a hypothetical newspaper - what we call a "wireframe" in the user-centered design business. It's not too-detailed a layout, but it should give you the basic idea.

Rather than cramming the content into a pseudo-newspaper, it presents stories the same way a Blog does - in reverse order, newest stories at the top, as they're published. If the user wants to see nothing but Sports, he/she clicks on the "Sports" link at the top, or the "Sports" (or "Vikings" or "Wild") icon next to the story head, or in the head's footer. If the user wants to find all references to Norm Coleman, he/she types "Nahm" in the "Search" box at the top, and gets all references to the Senator (that haven't been archived) in reverse chronological order. In other words - the user picks his/her own layout. The newspaper doesn't have to.

Of course, there's more to it than just a page layout.

• Ditch the long, detailed registrations. Collect the bare minimum of demographic info, if anything, and let the system do the rest.
• Use information gathered by the user's usage patterns and click-throughs to tailor the advertising content presented to the user, rather than making the user do the work. Associate the user's "profile" with something user-related (an IP address, a cookie, or whatever), private and automatic, rather than put the user through the laborious, frustrating process of entering personal information to "register".
• Use these features - lack of intrusiveness combined with heretofore-unheard-of access to information - as a key marketing hook. Why not? You'll have the best online newspaper - or at least the best-presented one - in the business.

Needless to say, if you're the editor of a newspaper website, I'd be more than happy to help out...

Posted by Mitch at September 22, 2003 05:50 AM