I really think this looks amazing. It would likely function amazingly well, too.
However, for this to work, you have to eliminate the space for ads. To deal with this, Rutledge suggests "Quality news is subscription only. You pay for valuable information. Fluff you get for free."
I somehow don't think it's that simple.
If you slam the digital door shut (much more than it is now at the Times), and only allow subscriber access, you'll do two things:
(1) vastly reduce your readership; if you want to go back to showing ads, you can't, because you no longer can brag about the vast numbers reading your website daily
(2) create a hyper-focused pirating scheme around disseminating NYTimes content for free
I love news. I love good reporting. When I'm no longer a student, I'll pay to get the Times at home. BUT, we've got a serious problem here; this design, while well thought-out, fails to acknowledge that it can't exist (eliminating ads) without changing the industry (changing readership drastically).
Exactly, there is already a news site that functions very good on mobile, and it's named Yahoo News. I'd say it's very probable that the author was aware of it.
Newspapers made the mistake of devaluing their ad inventory by increasing their supply. There's a really good – business – argument to be made for cutting the number of ad slots on the page.
You shouldn't underestimate how much newspapers know about the economics of their inventory. In many ways, ad slots are price discrimination. Companies that want 100% share of voice (ie: no one else gets ads on the page) will pay a premium to get it. A small company may just buy a cheaper ad slot at the bottom of the page. They have thousands of permutations on how they can sell ads, and they will shut off as many slots as necessary to get a premium campaign going.
Indeed. It can be a reinforcing cycle either way. On the one hand, you devalue your ads by taking any offer that comes along, ignoring the effectiveness of ads, and cramming your content with as much ad space as possible. In this mode readers have no value for ads and ad space becomes less and less valuable. On the other hand, if you put a lot of effort into procuring good and relevant ads, if you maintain a high standard for the ads you accept, and if you keep ad space under control then ads can potentially become more and more valuable.
If you come into the problem with the idea that the only way to control ad revenue is by the number of ads on the screen you've already lost, you're playing in the amateur leagues.
The iPhone example is funny because Apple themselves used the New York Times as the example in their "it's not the mobile Internet ... it's just the Internet" advertisement.
Those look nice, but I still prefer Google News' two-column layout. I can't stand when news organizations try to force everything into a single Twitter-like stream (Google News included).
The one thing I dislike (on the main page at least) is the separation of news and opinion/analysis. I can't think of many times where I've visited a news site and wanted to read only opinion or only news, but I can think of times where I've visited a site to read about a particular story - and read related articles that happen to be opinions/analysis.
The final result looks nice, but I hate these exercises, because if you are not fitting the same number of ads in the page, then you are not actually solving the same problem. You are solving a much easier problem, as almost all sites look better without ads.
Also, there's a major divide between what people seem to think looks nice and what seems to succeed. The Huffington Post is the biggest example of recent success in the news realm. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Is that despite of its design or because of it? I don't know. It's hard to separate out the effect of the editorial content from presentation.
Obviously he's not a NYT reader. I love the times. It's not broken. Their website is fantastic in every way. You can spend hours upon hours on it and digest more content, in whatever style you wish to navigate. It has a certain unity within the chaos. But it's not really chaos. The content is the layout. You won't find any other News organization who understands design more than NYT. They let the content design the layout, not the other way around.
Andy turned NYT into a Wordpress blog. :|
I'll give him credit for the work though, but I personally think NYT is an exception. But go ahead, every other news website, you have Cart Blanche.
I feel the same. I think the NYT's online page is fantastic - so much so that I pay $16 a month for it. I think they do an excellent job of laying out pages online yet still feeling like a newspaper. I like looking around the page for different stories, just as I would in a newspaper page. It's engaging, and I can't help but scan the whole page, read the headline, check out the picture captions.
When I look at his blog-style page, my eyes just glaze over the headlines.
The NYT App on the iPhone is basically his mobile mockup. And I've found that even on my iPhone, I'd rather look at the proper front page.
Yes. While I think he's right about the top nav, I bristled at his knock on the massive list of sections in the left nav. It allows discovery in the same way a massive Sunday Paper sitting in your lap does. You glance at the headlines for a moment and then decide what you really want to read first.
I agree, and I'll add that Andy's proposed reduction of the front page to a simple series of articles (as in the search interface) is a terrible idea.
He does not understand the value of a long-time reader's experience with parsing text-dense front pages, where headlines give way to subheds, and where reporters' bylines are visible. The whole point of the front page is to tell me what's important at a glance, and they really do a great job at that. It's clear that the editorial team puts a lot of thought into curating the "top half" of the front page, and the "series of articles" approach throws that out.
Well having been in the person in charge of a major news website myself I can say we all have lovely designs like this pinned to the walls next our desks.
And while I really like his designs and have turned to Andy many times for inspiration, there are some serious context problems... and while I'm bored and off work I might as well write a critique...
I had an near identical sports section to the one he designed pinned to me wall. But I can say he's screwed a few things up, gallery needs to be higher, users can't find a gallery that low (I know user testing surprises them hell out me to), no ads again. To use templating that image has to be shrunk, the quality you get through from external sources if often extremely poor, a reality he doesn't seem to have considered. Nothing screams amateur news like big pixalated images some non technical journo uploaded, and credibility is your only asset really.
Another reality is the business requires as many ad units as you can fit on a page, big media is expensive. Way more than a blog with 10 or so staff. Flying people all over the country, investigating stories, hotel rooms. Its like covering CES every day, which for most tech blogs would be there biggest yearly expense. Moan all you will but most people are out of touch with exact what it takes to make decent news.
And you can't win an argument about ads, you get dragged in front of finance, and if you convince them sales will drag you in front of the board, if you win that you get dragged in front of agencies to justify changes which may effect upcoming campaigns. Its a horrible process and really have to have solid arguments and research, essentially you are risking entire revenue streams, for what in a lot of cases isn't even break even business.
He's got what appears to be a lot of promoted content, thats expensive from a support point of view. I had a guy working under me whose job was literally to make the decision about what story superseeded the next.
The back lash you get from people for having a story up too long or not long enough is amazing. I've been called every name under the sun. Your audience isn't a defined well behaved demographic at all. Its like 4chan discussing politics, just a complete mess always on the attack.
..but at least when thanks comes its usually really good, for example this year I got a hand made Christmas card from the Indonesian Fishing Association for getting a reporter in touch with them. Somehow it made up for a year of insults. It was real touching.
The only real solution, and we worked damned hard with Google on this is indexing getting people to the page directly, forgetting all about overview pages and landing pages.
We ended up constructing a 24 hour social media team. We pushed the news via automation, blood, sweat, and tears to the people. And Google rewarded us, we entered the elite list of news suppliers whom google monitor for breaking stories. It works, it really does, but its hard work. I bet there aren't many people hear who have brought Google employees to an argument with your boss ;)
Anyway he's also under estimating the sheer volume of stories being generated. He's designed a nice blog template, not something that produces several hundred of stories a day over dozens and dozens of subsection. He's hasn't considered the scale, and the unreliability of content. You can do editorial pages like that for major events, but not the daily drab. The real solution to the problem was as noted above social engineering, you need to get people (super nodes) who act as conduits to propagate good stories for you.
The next is the infographics. Again beautiful, I used to kill for decent info graphics coming in. If I wasn't snowed under I'd try and create them myself.
But the reality is graphic designer can't do it, they have huge work loads already, and remember you can't just hire more staff, its break even business. THEN you need a subject matter expert to assembly it and give it to the graphic designer.
Infographics takes time, and its something that Google ...
Also probably worth mentioning while on the subject all my research and experience added up to designs that are very close to Al Jeezera.
Perhaps I just favor it because it resembles my own thinking but I believe they have one of the best designed news sites out there: http://english.aljazeera.net
Clean, crisp, clear, all gridded up nice and tidy. Handling information overload well.
Being a new kid on the block, no legacy systems or clients to contended with, learning from every one else's mistakes I assume play a huge part in why Al Jeezera looks so good.
If I can remember the worst news site I've seen I'll post it. Its a state level TV station from America somewhere, shocking abuses in design. It was like trying to read at a pocket dictionary from 10 feet away, total text chaos.
Yep, I'm working on a political community lobby site ATM.
Essentially I am planning on creating a build your laws site. More or less a wiki with better forum support and auditing control.
A major talk back radio station in my country is prepared to support it if I finished it. I also looked after them as my role was looking after the "current affairs" suite, which included radio as well as TV.
But I have to build it myself. I have to many features that using a turn-key solution would be more harmful than helpful, and a wiki isn't really that hard to build. But some of the features I want I have never seen implemented else where so it may be a trial by fire with lots of problems.
I can easily get funding for it because of its ability to be high profile, but a conflict of interest arises taking money. For it to work I need to be able to take a stance against other lobby groups, takings a stand for the community, make the user feel like they are changing the world. And TBH if it can make noise in the talk back crowd then hot topics will probably end getting shunted into politicians faces.
Taking money corporates instantly devalues my only assets however. I'll work that out though, lots of talk still to be done, and I need a web concept up. Current all my work has been at a database level handling versioning, commenting within comments, hierarchy structures and stuff. Designing a living document is quite fun :)
I also own a really decent domain name which I plan to launch political satire off. Basically many journos I know I want an outlet to say things that the eat at them every day. You could say something along the lines of Stephen Colbert but done news/blog style. Thats on my back burner though, I'll get to it when I get to it, which maybe never.
One of the best online newspaper designs I've seen recently is the Indian paper The Hindu (http://www.thehindu.com/). While most Indian newspapers will give you eye-cancer just by looking at them (ex: The Times of India, which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country also has one of the most horrible online editions, plastered with spammy ads and horrible layout). The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. (The original design was like a 1995 webpage)
Also up there in my list is NPR (http://www.npr.org/) and PBS (http://www.pbs.org/). Not technically newspapers, but their pages are mostly about news delivery.
The Hindu looked bad too, a couple of years ago. They started testing a new interface at beta.thehindu.com for sometime before using the new interface for everyone.
The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. True.
I love having images to scan instead of just headlines (which Andy seems to detest), so when my local newspaper redesigned their page, I fell in love http://www.sydsvenskan.se/ (Swedish)
Breaking news at the very top, then a top story, then the other top 4 stories. Then a simple scrolling list of the latest news by time descending (great when you check in a few times a day).
Of course, as a local paper they have a lot less content making it a much easier job than something on the scale of the NYT.
What's your take on the strong emphasis he puts on separation of "news" and "opinion" and whether an editorial team could adequately resolve that? As a reader the distinction seems very artificial. I can see how senior newspaper executives might like his argument about emphasising the volume of "editorial writers ... promoted as exclusive, valuable properties" though.
Editorials and blogs are the same thing. They are opinion pieces, they are not news, they are bias, and often have an agenda. Sometimes they are satire. That isn't news its entertainment.
From a purist point of view the news should be factual and impartial. Editorials fail to impartial most of the time.
You have to choose what side of the fence you sit on, are you the BBC or are you Fox News? are you news or entertainment?
I support editorials because they are usually done by journalists who love there craft and do so on there own time, brings job satisfaction to staff.
It also helps pay for the craft to continue. I'm not so hot on celebrity bloggers though, thats just cheap money grabbing most of the time that can devalue the brand. Subject matter experts like sports stars I'll support, but bringing in some TV star to comment fashion is a joke.
But it works, and you have to take the bad with the good.
And most importantly because I think person X is a moronic jerk doesn't make me correct. It causes debate which is good, a long as debate isn't distraction. Which often happens.
Personally I don't like seperating them into "news" and "entertainment". I wouldn't ever class an opinion piece as news, however it is possible for an opinion piece to not be entertaining (as in, not try to be) and to actually be a useful aspect of finding out about current events.
I agree that provocative regular columnists and guest feature writers are the equivalent of bloggers, and his bold use of regular columnists' names is one of the things I like about his design. I guess that my original point was more that the tendency to editorialise in and around news articles themselves is widespread in modern news media (my perceptions being shaped by a UK print media that wears its biases on its sleeve) and the readers seem to demand it; it seems odd for a designer to come along and assert editors ought to separate anything with any semblance of commentary into a distinct section "separated from news" and apparently subordinate (at least in page position) to it.
I can say your teams work has been in many more arguments and importance decision than you realize. If I go back to work for my ex employer I may just reach out to you.
Still 50/50 on it but writing that review has reminded me of the good times and not just the bad :)
I must admit that it was with some amused curiosity that the primary thing removed to make the site cleaner was "ads". That along with opening paragraphs were the two major changes in layout.
It seems that the author thought that his solitary 'subscribe' button would provide enough income to support a large media organisation and make it nicely profitable - all internet commentary to the contrary.
The other thing I took away was from the navigation bar. So what if it's long? If I'm a regular user, I prefer a mildly long navigation bar as long as the items stay in the same place. I can then get to the subsection I want very quickly, without having to wait for some eye-pleasing pretty animation slowly exposing the subs of some higher heading. Obviously this is a highly personal issue, but his 'prettier' version of doing this involved horizontal nested menus that take up a monstrous amount of vertical space. Most of us have widescreens (not tallscreens) on our non-mobile devices - and woe betide those folks using netbooks.
I think you're right - it's a nice layout for a blog, but doesn't really suit a rapidly-changing, info-packed news site.
Do you think there would be a market for rapidly produced lo-fi infographics? I'm thinking it might be possible approaching it somewhat like XKCD does with comics.
To me it is incredibly important that an abstract is presented up front before I click through to the article. For other news sites (like CNN) that are more about breaking news and less about well written and researched journalism - just the headline is fine (because chances are the article won't say much more than the headline).
NYT's strength is that it is a professional journalistic organization and thus taking words _off_ the page would only serve to betray the value that the NYT offers.
>The Times politics page. I think the object of the game must be to fit as much “content” onto the page as possible in an effort to overwhelm the reader, tricking them into believing that the NY Times is just bursting with a mindbogglingly-bottomless array of important information. If only the reader could learn to ignore 60% of what’s here, she might have a chance at a pleasant experience. Please stop helping. What you’ve got here is not content, but noise.
You can't get a good coverage of world events in the number of items that Rutledge wants. The world is noisy, and what Rutledge is suggesting vastly oversimplifies. I'm sure it would convert wonderfully, raise ad revenue, all that. It wouldn't be good journalism. Even if the NYT is full of pointless noise, it's still better than a handful of painstakingly crafted articles. A handful of pretty, well-formed articles cannot accurately reflect a disordered world. If the NYT isn't noisy it's not doing its job.
I don't like the final result, and Rutledge dismisses many of the realities of site design.
I think the existing NYTimes site is among the examplars of good Web news site design. My principle gripe is that there's too much whitespace around the primary content. That's probably a consequence of both a 1920x1080 display (laptop), and highly aggressive ad blocking. (Yeah, yeah. I'll stop blocking ads when advertisers stop being complete fckwits about making annoying ads, and/or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.)
There are a few valid points Rutlege makes. Many of the navigation elements are little (or never) used by me, including the left and top sidebars.
I want my microcontent.* That means a brief story summary. I have an RSS reader and subscribe to the NY Time site on it. I rarely read it. Why? Because there's no microcontent. For most news stories, the first paragraph is all I need (actually, in all absolute truth, the headline itself is far too much). If I want to read more, that paragraph really helps make the decision to do so. Jacob Nielson's covered this topic very well.
Presenting the content on the homepage, while making for dense page, does make a good jump point. My eye can scan far more quickly than I can click back and forth through pages.
The classic wastes of time for me on the Times are:
- Video content. Really, text tells the story far more quickly most of the time. A video feature can be a benefit (and for some rare stories it's hugely useful), but I _don't_ think it belongs on the homepage.
- The "Talking Heads" features. There's something in how these are set up that frequently makes for a compelling lede, but fails to deliver. The format just doesn't work for me.
- The formulaic three-headlines-per-section on the front page. Some days some sections deserve far more news, and some sections (sorry, but "Dining", "Fashion", and "Automobiles" hold little or no interest) deserve none. To me.
Rutledge has succeeded in vastly simplifying the Times's front page. By removing most of the informational content and utility from it. His design works for mobile (and as he notes, the Times has a good mobile site). It's not a good full-featured site design.
Video content brings in 20x the ad rate of display ads. The news agency I worked for had a "push video for all content" stance because of this, I assume all other news sites have the same stance.
You bring up the biggest argument of them all, I had it every day with the site I was responsible for. I'm a minimalist myself, and the person I reported to was a everything and the kitchen sink guy. We had some heated arguments followed by days of ignoring each other LOL
I hated his approach, but our numbers did suggest many people landed to the front page each morning and read the whole thing. So having a lot of information and links on the page is very important. So assume your behavior validated as normal viewing behavior. Behavior changes through out the day though which sucks LOL
And the most amazing thing was user testing is near useless, the demographics, experiences, behaviors are so vast. Even as noted the time of day has a huge effect on readers.
So no matter what you do you isolate a community, so you compromise and compromise, and produce the most average pile of junk anyone has ever seen. But people understand it, sure they moan, but they get it. Go for the lowest common denominator.
The times uses the motif of a news paper online, I guess because it's contextually people understand. I don't know if by design or accident, but there is a level if usability there because of the fact.
Its messy but its reliable, and sometimes thats what design is about, not a great looking product, but something that does its job.
The lifesaver for me has been the "Remove This Permanently" Firefox plugin (well, that an the Flashblock plugin).
If something's sufficiently annoying, I just find its xpath and remove it.
Does this put me in the top fractional 1% of browsers? I have no doubt. Does this work for me? Yes. Does the 1% bit bother me? Not in the least.
If anything, it's the final trump card in an argument I've had with web-design geeks that the end-user ultimately trumps style.
Video very likely does bring in the money. I can live with that. But so long as I can rip out the offending content, I'm cool with it.
I've also seen some other good/bad paper designs. In the Bay Area, I'm continually amazed at how good the _design_ of the SF Chronicle is (the content's of course gone fully to crap), and how poor that of the San Jose Mercury News (in the capital of Silicon Valley) is. I actually did an analysis of how much (and respectively little) content was presented above the fold in each design.
Sadly each, even in their online incarnation, is becoming increasingly irrelevant and local-focus blogs/news services are emerging.
On the topic -- if you haven't read John Sealy Brown's _Information Rules_, I'd highly recommend his section on the community-binding element of newspapers (and sports teams). It's a strong indictment of micro-targeted / individualized news streams.
The formulaic three-headlines-per-section on the front page. Some days some sections deserve far more news, and some sections (sorry, but "Dining", "Fashion", and "Automobiles" hold little or no interest) deserve none. To me.
That's one of the big arguable weaknesses Andy could have mentioned. If you have a subscription to a newspaper website they ought to be able to algorithmically identify which sections and columnists you read the most and prioritise content from them on the home page. The problem with "visual noise" on headline pages is far more to do with displaying excessive quantities of uninteresting content than lack of white space; Andy's design goes too far the other way in leaving one homepage story above the fold on a typical user's browser.
I sit in the middle of blocking ads - I block flash, but leave images. Animations are distracting, and 'proper' advertising tends to use low levels of animation in their images (by 'proper', I mean that newspaper sites don't tend to have "you are the 1000000th visitor!" animated gifs)
The worse ad culprit I ever saw was an ad on article pages that would wait on a timer that would have you about halfway through the second paragraph... then expand to cover the article text. I can't imagine what kind of fresh marketing graduate thought that that would be a winner.
Also, regarding your comment on microcontent - it's often a necessity in the news world because Subeditor Bob has come up with a wacky headline that sounds witty, but out of context has nothing to do with the article. I'm all for the brief illuminating blurb.
As one of the designers of a major news organization redesign, it's very nice to do a pretty page but to honestly think you can get away with no ads is a not only a losing battle but one that doesn't take the needs of the client seriously.
I also like how the NYT's website looks like a newspaper with a variety of content. The redesign looks like a Wordpress template.
Few downvotes there. Like to hear why people disagree or if I've said something clearly wrong.
Note that my comment was specifically about criticism of the design being familiar and not innovative. I'm saying these things are ok if the design works well.
As a total noob in comparison to most readers of HN, I have to totally agree with this sentiment--not that it's a noob idea but I feel like there are very skilled and brilliant people here that want to show the world their amazing talents and sometimes lose sight of things. It reminds me of what I always see on that show with Chef Gordon Ramsey where he's always telling these hot shot Chefs to stop being so cocky with their creations and that simple is often better; no one wants a 58 flavour chocolate creme brulee steak muffin.
Better is Better, but again I think we have to remember, that it's all subjective.
The problem with such a post is that it violates the first principle of user centered design. Talk to your users. Did anyone tell him that NYT is broken? Did he go and ask a single user who goes to NYT everyday to figure out what his problems are? Or saw him use the site.
It's easy to re-design something from outside in. It's much harder to design it inside out when you have a more complete picture of what users are doing and have a rough idea of what they want.
The design has its moments but I actually like NYT. The only thing I would like more is fixed dimensions for items on the front page, maybe 2 column layout with both sides perfectly aligned per item. The draw of newspaper sites is both the quality content within articles but the curation of articles themselves so having everything in uniform lists is too confusing. Additions I wouldn't mind are most tweeted or tweeted by your friends type social media integration.
If design was the only thing killing the newspaper industry their problems would be solved.
Andy's designs look beautiful, but I'm reminded of the old saying: "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy".
I'm afraid that if you take his designs as a starting point, and revise them based on the needs of the NYTimes and the expectations of its millions of visitors, they would require a large number of changes and would more closely resemble the current NYTimes.com
A few years ago, I laid out head-to-head comparisons of the top newspapers in the US with and without adblock and noscript. NYTimes, on a screen, is easily the best newspaper. Unfortunately, the pressure of jamming more and more links and stories above the fold seems to have eroded the NYTimes usability.
We should do a poll too: I think a lot of netizens would support NYTimes to the same degree they do NPR, but I don't think the average netizen donates $260 to NPR annually (the price NYTimes is asking for their tablet app).
Andy is a talented designer, but his style shows through a bit too strongly here. He knows how to utilize whitespace to create an aesthetically pleasing visual flow, but I don't think he pays enough respect the essence of a newspaper—namely density of information.
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[ 132 ms ] story [ 540 ms ] threadHowever, for this to work, you have to eliminate the space for ads. To deal with this, Rutledge suggests "Quality news is subscription only. You pay for valuable information. Fluff you get for free."
I somehow don't think it's that simple.
If you slam the digital door shut (much more than it is now at the Times), and only allow subscriber access, you'll do two things:
(1) vastly reduce your readership; if you want to go back to showing ads, you can't, because you no longer can brag about the vast numbers reading your website daily (2) create a hyper-focused pirating scheme around disseminating NYTimes content for free
I love news. I love good reporting. When I'm no longer a student, I'll pay to get the Times at home. BUT, we've got a serious problem here; this design, while well thought-out, fails to acknowledge that it can't exist (eliminating ads) without changing the industry (changing readership drastically).
I very much look forward to seeing this movie: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/page_one_inside_the_new_york... which touches on these issues.
"Since news is accessed only via subscription, most of the ads can be eliminated from the pages."
That's like saying because you pay for magazines they also don't need to have ads. That's in no way at all how the content business works.
If you come into the problem with the idea that the only way to control ad revenue is by the number of ads on the screen you've already lost, you're playing in the amateur leagues.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzV-W_6WOm0
Also, there's a major divide between what people seem to think looks nice and what seems to succeed. The Huffington Post is the biggest example of recent success in the news realm. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Is that despite of its design or because of it? I don't know. It's hard to separate out the effect of the editorial content from presentation.
Andy turned NYT into a Wordpress blog. :|
I'll give him credit for the work though, but I personally think NYT is an exception. But go ahead, every other news website, you have Cart Blanche.
cc: Khoi Vinh
When I look at his blog-style page, my eyes just glaze over the headlines.
The NYT App on the iPhone is basically his mobile mockup. And I've found that even on my iPhone, I'd rather look at the proper front page.
I would have subscribed, but they gave me a free year after introducing the paywall.
He does not understand the value of a long-time reader's experience with parsing text-dense front pages, where headlines give way to subheds, and where reporters' bylines are visible. The whole point of the front page is to tell me what's important at a glance, and they really do a great job at that. It's clear that the editorial team puts a lot of thought into curating the "top half" of the front page, and the "series of articles" approach throws that out.
And while I really like his designs and have turned to Andy many times for inspiration, there are some serious context problems... and while I'm bored and off work I might as well write a critique...
I had an near identical sports section to the one he designed pinned to me wall. But I can say he's screwed a few things up, gallery needs to be higher, users can't find a gallery that low (I know user testing surprises them hell out me to), no ads again. To use templating that image has to be shrunk, the quality you get through from external sources if often extremely poor, a reality he doesn't seem to have considered. Nothing screams amateur news like big pixalated images some non technical journo uploaded, and credibility is your only asset really.
Another reality is the business requires as many ad units as you can fit on a page, big media is expensive. Way more than a blog with 10 or so staff. Flying people all over the country, investigating stories, hotel rooms. Its like covering CES every day, which for most tech blogs would be there biggest yearly expense. Moan all you will but most people are out of touch with exact what it takes to make decent news.
And you can't win an argument about ads, you get dragged in front of finance, and if you convince them sales will drag you in front of the board, if you win that you get dragged in front of agencies to justify changes which may effect upcoming campaigns. Its a horrible process and really have to have solid arguments and research, essentially you are risking entire revenue streams, for what in a lot of cases isn't even break even business.
He's got what appears to be a lot of promoted content, thats expensive from a support point of view. I had a guy working under me whose job was literally to make the decision about what story superseeded the next.
The back lash you get from people for having a story up too long or not long enough is amazing. I've been called every name under the sun. Your audience isn't a defined well behaved demographic at all. Its like 4chan discussing politics, just a complete mess always on the attack.
..but at least when thanks comes its usually really good, for example this year I got a hand made Christmas card from the Indonesian Fishing Association for getting a reporter in touch with them. Somehow it made up for a year of insults. It was real touching.
The only real solution, and we worked damned hard with Google on this is indexing getting people to the page directly, forgetting all about overview pages and landing pages.
We ended up constructing a 24 hour social media team. We pushed the news via automation, blood, sweat, and tears to the people. And Google rewarded us, we entered the elite list of news suppliers whom google monitor for breaking stories. It works, it really does, but its hard work. I bet there aren't many people hear who have brought Google employees to an argument with your boss ;)
Anyway he's also under estimating the sheer volume of stories being generated. He's designed a nice blog template, not something that produces several hundred of stories a day over dozens and dozens of subsection. He's hasn't considered the scale, and the unreliability of content. You can do editorial pages like that for major events, but not the daily drab. The real solution to the problem was as noted above social engineering, you need to get people (super nodes) who act as conduits to propagate good stories for you.
The next is the infographics. Again beautiful, I used to kill for decent info graphics coming in. If I wasn't snowed under I'd try and create them myself.
But the reality is graphic designer can't do it, they have huge work loads already, and remember you can't just hire more staff, its break even business. THEN you need a subject matter expert to assembly it and give it to the graphic designer.
Infographics takes time, and its something that Google ...
Perhaps I just favor it because it resembles my own thinking but I believe they have one of the best designed news sites out there: http://english.aljazeera.net
Clean, crisp, clear, all gridded up nice and tidy. Handling information overload well.
Being a new kid on the block, no legacy systems or clients to contended with, learning from every one else's mistakes I assume play a huge part in why Al Jeezera looks so good.
If I can remember the worst news site I've seen I'll post it. Its a state level TV station from America somewhere, shocking abuses in design. It was like trying to read at a pocket dictionary from 10 feet away, total text chaos.
Essentially I am planning on creating a build your laws site. More or less a wiki with better forum support and auditing control.
A major talk back radio station in my country is prepared to support it if I finished it. I also looked after them as my role was looking after the "current affairs" suite, which included radio as well as TV.
But I have to build it myself. I have to many features that using a turn-key solution would be more harmful than helpful, and a wiki isn't really that hard to build. But some of the features I want I have never seen implemented else where so it may be a trial by fire with lots of problems.
I can easily get funding for it because of its ability to be high profile, but a conflict of interest arises taking money. For it to work I need to be able to take a stance against other lobby groups, takings a stand for the community, make the user feel like they are changing the world. And TBH if it can make noise in the talk back crowd then hot topics will probably end getting shunted into politicians faces.
Taking money corporates instantly devalues my only assets however. I'll work that out though, lots of talk still to be done, and I need a web concept up. Current all my work has been at a database level handling versioning, commenting within comments, hierarchy structures and stuff. Designing a living document is quite fun :)
I also own a really decent domain name which I plan to launch political satire off. Basically many journos I know I want an outlet to say things that the eat at them every day. You could say something along the lines of Stephen Colbert but done news/blog style. Thats on my back burner though, I'll get to it when I get to it, which maybe never.
Also up there in my list is NPR (http://www.npr.org/) and PBS (http://www.pbs.org/). Not technically newspapers, but their pages are mostly about news delivery.
The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. True.
Edit: http://www.bbc.co.uk might be even better example of a good news site design.
Breaking news at the very top, then a top story, then the other top 4 stories. Then a simple scrolling list of the latest news by time descending (great when you check in a few times a day).
Of course, as a local paper they have a lot less content making it a much easier job than something on the scale of the NYT.
From a purist point of view the news should be factual and impartial. Editorials fail to impartial most of the time.
You have to choose what side of the fence you sit on, are you the BBC or are you Fox News? are you news or entertainment?
I support editorials because they are usually done by journalists who love there craft and do so on there own time, brings job satisfaction to staff.
It also helps pay for the craft to continue. I'm not so hot on celebrity bloggers though, thats just cheap money grabbing most of the time that can devalue the brand. Subject matter experts like sports stars I'll support, but bringing in some TV star to comment fashion is a joke.
But it works, and you have to take the bad with the good.
And most importantly because I think person X is a moronic jerk doesn't make me correct. It causes debate which is good, a long as debate isn't distraction. Which often happens.
I can say your teams work has been in many more arguments and importance decision than you realize. If I go back to work for my ex employer I may just reach out to you.
Still 50/50 on it but writing that review has reminded me of the good times and not just the bad :)
It seems that the author thought that his solitary 'subscribe' button would provide enough income to support a large media organisation and make it nicely profitable - all internet commentary to the contrary.
The other thing I took away was from the navigation bar. So what if it's long? If I'm a regular user, I prefer a mildly long navigation bar as long as the items stay in the same place. I can then get to the subsection I want very quickly, without having to wait for some eye-pleasing pretty animation slowly exposing the subs of some higher heading. Obviously this is a highly personal issue, but his 'prettier' version of doing this involved horizontal nested menus that take up a monstrous amount of vertical space. Most of us have widescreens (not tallscreens) on our non-mobile devices - and woe betide those folks using netbooks.
I think you're right - it's a nice layout for a blog, but doesn't really suit a rapidly-changing, info-packed news site.
NYT's strength is that it is a professional journalistic organization and thus taking words _off_ the page would only serve to betray the value that the NYT offers.
You can't get a good coverage of world events in the number of items that Rutledge wants. The world is noisy, and what Rutledge is suggesting vastly oversimplifies. I'm sure it would convert wonderfully, raise ad revenue, all that. It wouldn't be good journalism. Even if the NYT is full of pointless noise, it's still better than a handful of painstakingly crafted articles. A handful of pretty, well-formed articles cannot accurately reflect a disordered world. If the NYT isn't noisy it's not doing its job.
I think the existing NYTimes site is among the examplars of good Web news site design. My principle gripe is that there's too much whitespace around the primary content. That's probably a consequence of both a 1920x1080 display (laptop), and highly aggressive ad blocking. (Yeah, yeah. I'll stop blocking ads when advertisers stop being complete fckwits about making annoying ads, and/or when hell freezes over, whichever comes first.)
There are a few valid points Rutlege makes. Many of the navigation elements are little (or never) used by me, including the left and top sidebars.
I want my microcontent.* That means a brief story summary. I have an RSS reader and subscribe to the NY Time site on it. I rarely read it. Why? Because there's no microcontent. For most news stories, the first paragraph is all I need (actually, in all absolute truth, the headline itself is far too much). If I want to read more, that paragraph really helps make the decision to do so. Jacob Nielson's covered this topic very well.
Presenting the content on the homepage, while making for dense page, does make a good jump point. My eye can scan far more quickly than I can click back and forth through pages.
The classic wastes of time for me on the Times are:
- Video content. Really, text tells the story far more quickly most of the time. A video feature can be a benefit (and for some rare stories it's hugely useful), but I _don't_ think it belongs on the homepage.
- The "Talking Heads" features. There's something in how these are set up that frequently makes for a compelling lede, but fails to deliver. The format just doesn't work for me.
- The formulaic three-headlines-per-section on the front page. Some days some sections deserve far more news, and some sections (sorry, but "Dining", "Fashion", and "Automobiles" hold little or no interest) deserve none. To me.
Rutledge has succeeded in vastly simplifying the Times's front page. By removing most of the informational content and utility from it. His design works for mobile (and as he notes, the Times has a good mobile site). It's not a good full-featured site design.
You bring up the biggest argument of them all, I had it every day with the site I was responsible for. I'm a minimalist myself, and the person I reported to was a everything and the kitchen sink guy. We had some heated arguments followed by days of ignoring each other LOL
I hated his approach, but our numbers did suggest many people landed to the front page each morning and read the whole thing. So having a lot of information and links on the page is very important. So assume your behavior validated as normal viewing behavior. Behavior changes through out the day though which sucks LOL
And the most amazing thing was user testing is near useless, the demographics, experiences, behaviors are so vast. Even as noted the time of day has a huge effect on readers.
So no matter what you do you isolate a community, so you compromise and compromise, and produce the most average pile of junk anyone has ever seen. But people understand it, sure they moan, but they get it. Go for the lowest common denominator.
The times uses the motif of a news paper online, I guess because it's contextually people understand. I don't know if by design or accident, but there is a level if usability there because of the fact.
Its messy but its reliable, and sometimes thats what design is about, not a great looking product, but something that does its job.
If something's sufficiently annoying, I just find its xpath and remove it.
Does this put me in the top fractional 1% of browsers? I have no doubt. Does this work for me? Yes. Does the 1% bit bother me? Not in the least.
If anything, it's the final trump card in an argument I've had with web-design geeks that the end-user ultimately trumps style.
Video very likely does bring in the money. I can live with that. But so long as I can rip out the offending content, I'm cool with it.
I've also seen some other good/bad paper designs. In the Bay Area, I'm continually amazed at how good the _design_ of the SF Chronicle is (the content's of course gone fully to crap), and how poor that of the San Jose Mercury News (in the capital of Silicon Valley) is. I actually did an analysis of how much (and respectively little) content was presented above the fold in each design.
Sadly each, even in their online incarnation, is becoming increasingly irrelevant and local-focus blogs/news services are emerging.
On the topic -- if you haven't read John Sealy Brown's _Information Rules_, I'd highly recommend his section on the community-binding element of newspapers (and sports teams). It's a strong indictment of micro-targeted / individualized news streams.
That's one of the big arguable weaknesses Andy could have mentioned. If you have a subscription to a newspaper website they ought to be able to algorithmically identify which sections and columnists you read the most and prioritise content from them on the home page. The problem with "visual noise" on headline pages is far more to do with displaying excessive quantities of uninteresting content than lack of white space; Andy's design goes too far the other way in leaving one homepage story above the fold on a typical user's browser.
The worse ad culprit I ever saw was an ad on article pages that would wait on a timer that would have you about halfway through the second paragraph... then expand to cover the article text. I can't imagine what kind of fresh marketing graduate thought that that would be a winner.
Also, regarding your comment on microcontent - it's often a necessity in the news world because Subeditor Bob has come up with a wacky headline that sounds witty, but out of context has nothing to do with the article. I'm all for the brief illuminating blurb.
Regarding headlines, Jakob Nielsen addresses this too: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html
Traditional print headlines fare poorly in Web form.
There's been a fair amount written as to how HuffPo writes web search/link/click-bait articles and headlines as well.
I also like how the NYT's website looks like a newspaper with a variety of content. The redesign looks like a Wordpress template.
Sometimes it takes courage to put forward a design that doesn't have the glamour of the new. Things that work well can often be boring.
EDIT: quote is from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2803681
Note that my comment was specifically about criticism of the design being familiar and not innovative. I'm saying these things are ok if the design works well.
Better is Better, but again I think we have to remember, that it's all subjective.
P.S.
Don't let the down votes discourage you. :)
It's easy to re-design something from outside in. It's much harder to design it inside out when you have a more complete picture of what users are doing and have a rough idea of what they want.
If design was the only thing killing the newspaper industry their problems would be solved.
I'm afraid that if you take his designs as a starting point, and revise them based on the needs of the NYTimes and the expectations of its millions of visitors, they would require a large number of changes and would more closely resemble the current NYTimes.com
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
We should do a poll too: I think a lot of netizens would support NYTimes to the same degree they do NPR, but I don't think the average netizen donates $260 to NPR annually (the price NYTimes is asking for their tablet app).
/rolls eyes.