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Make an online newspaper worth reading, please

April 3, 2009 at 8:53 am In Life, Rants, Web, 2 Comments

A little while ago I saw a fantastic TED talk by Jacek Utko, who told us how through design he helped turn around flagging newspaper readership numbers in Eastern Europe through good design. He basically turned what was your standard boring and drab newspaper format and turned them in to a more designed and visually rich experience that readers wanted to hold, read and enjoy.

“Design can change not just your product, it can change your workflow, it can change your company. We just need inspiration, vision, and determination to operate at the highest level. To be good is not enough.” – Jacek Utko

It is no secret that newspapers are facing extinction in the print form. People are looking online for their source of news and current affairs and they don’t want to read yesterdays news any more. The monopoly on news is no longer tightly controlled by the media agencies. Each day they lose a little bit more control to independent blogs, websites, twitter and Facebook, although slowly, one by one the media agencies are buying these up in an attempt to maintain the control. No surprise there but they do this so they can continue to replicate a formula that has worked pretty well for them so far, which is.

1. Write some words about something topical which could be news, or opinion
2. Take a photo to make it more interesting (so it isn’t all just words)
3. Add lots of ads
4. Print it

Now, in an age where your teenage kids are producing videos, 3d animations, flash movies, and mashups in their bedrooms, why god why are the online “newspapers” not doing the same thing? Why must they cling so dearly to their archaic model for presenting the news? White paper, serif font, colour photo. Sure they have made the paper digital, but it is the same ole same ole when it comes to content. In fact, the print editions are more interesting and interactive, with their big awkward pages, and the occasional multi-page feature which has some nice colourful graphics.

For the online edition however, I would much rather look at something that is designed, and crafted, to stimulate and engage me. Just as Apple made a portable music thing-a-majiggy an object of desire through design, newspapers should try to do the same with their news. Seriously, lets take Jacek’s ideas another step further.

What if along side the “news”, newspapers made an actual attempt to add form to their current (and in many cases lacking) function. The first thing they could do is actually “design” their sites. Make them visually rich, easy to view, less cluttered and have some semblance of style. Things may not fit into tidy boxes and columns all the time, but they will just have to deal with that. But not only change the form of the news online into something more attractive in general, what if they, say, ran interactive features along side the day to day news, that gave you in-depth analysis on topical events. That’s the cool thing about the web, you don’t have to have just words and a photo. There are all sorts of cool things like Flash, JavaScript and Video. Plus each article is it’s own island, and is not connected to the rest of the news other than by a single link.

There is so much the format of the web allows you to do. For example, imagine if you can, a digital version of the traditional two-four page spread analysis piece. This digital version could be well designed visually to stand on its own as sort of a feature portal. It could be interactive, media rich and highly informative. Imagine still (are you still imagining?), as an actual example, a dedicated feature on the global financial crisis. This is a complicated story to report on because there are so many different levels of complexity to it, and it means different things to different people in how it effects them. Business readers will want to know different things to say, an at home dad, but both are desperate to understand the topic. Now you could give them a series of individual and non-connected articles on a daily basis that use text and a photo to communicate, or you could:

• Provide interactive graphs, and timelines demonstrating the scale of the crisis detailing critical events and the impacts on world markets over time. A nice interactive draggable graphic timeline would do this nicely. Here is a nice example at the NYT (its a nice start).
• Embedded YouTube style video of analysis. Here is a good one.
  
  The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
• Add other interactive elements that provide visual analysis on the crisis. Like graphs. Lots and lots of graphs and data depicting the scale of bailouts and blowouts. I like pictorials and graphics.
• Use maps as a visualisation tool, here is an okay example, but you could do much more exciting things
• Provide links off to key news articles elsewhere within the site about the same topic. Link them coherently, like “To read more on the effect on the New Zealand economy…” . Visually group the articles together under subject headings so you can see related articles at a glance.
• Provide feeds from Twitter, so you can see what other people are thinking about the topic
• Have some fun, include a flash game or two.
• Wrap the whole feature up in a great fully themed design that stimulates you visually, and entices you to explore, and be informed. Make the whole thing an experience.

Or you could do this:

What is wrong with the above (the idea, not Kermit)? Well for one, newspapers are geared up to write text articles. They employ journalists and photographers. They syndicate text and photos through existing channels, that are used to text and photos. To start producing video, Flash, and other media formats they, the news agencies, would have to evolve considerably. How would the editorial process work? What are the costs involved? Could they outsource the creation of such things to people who are good at doing media rich content? Possibly. There is a whole web full of content out there that the online newspapers could be using, but by including information from various sources, feeds and other websites they are potentially losing control of your viewer-ship. They fear that you may wander off to the sources directly (the Internet lends itself well for this you know) and that means you may look at and click less ads in their website. Or worse, you might discover another site that is more informative and interesting than the newspapers.

For a newspaper to change from the crap format they have right now, and their sole reliance on advertising to something better and more engaging online, it will cost them. But, is this a new opportunity for them? Would you actually pay to be better informed and to get your news presented well?

What if they offered a free “news and ads” version of the site (this is pretty much what you get now). Then, what if for a month by month subscription you can get access to media rich, and more comprehensive detailed analysis on the news and current affairs. I want to be informed and to learn. I want the information in forms other than text and photos, and I understand that this costs money to produce. I am immune to online advertising anyway so they need a better model to earn revenue. I want to be entertained, and enjoy the news. If they priced it right I would pay.

Lets say they charged $4 a month (or a dollar a week), and perhaps 5% take up this new news+ option. If your online readership is 600,000 unique browsers a week/month/year, lets say that adds up to $100,000 a month in news+ subscriptions. That is $1.2M extra for an online news site like nzherald.co.nz, and for that money you can generate a lot of nice content. For you at home, for the price of a cup of coffee a week you can get your news looking better, more coherent and interactive. I would pay it.

Will it happen. I think it has to. News content on the Internet could be really interactive, engaging, and informative, but at the end of the day it might be hard work and they might need to adapt to new ideas. It will take some balls to change. Anyway, I made my New Years resolution to not read online newspapers. It might take a few more people to do the same before they change their ways.