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The problem with reverse chronological order is that when you have high-throughput sites, 'news' disappears too quickly from the homepage. Der Spiegel uses a combination of a blog (newest 'big' stories at the top) and after that has a short pre-view of posts by category. It works beatutifully, which is why this is the No.1 german news site and all other German news sites have adopted this style. Amazing that Anglo-Saxon sites are not copying it, yet.
Der Spiegel is not perfect though. They don't allow comments on articles. Instead, they rely on old-fashioned discussion forums. Also, their RSS feeds simply suck, as you can't preview the firest few sentences of a story.
Nonetheless, it is still the best I have ever come across.
I like the idea of Digg-style control over how the homepage looks. But if sites don't want to give that a shot, a robust set of RSS feeds and, perhaps, widgets, should help.
Great post.
This is an interesting article because this isn’t just about a transition in style or print to web; it’s about a transition of power. Digg lets its users decide what’s important…what is news worthy. Could you imagine if CNN or Fox News let their viewers decide what news should be reported? …if media, in general, let the public dictate what stories were broadcast/printed? That would be the end of it. It’s a good thing the web is unique.
Thanks for the pointer -- Der Speigel is indeed laid out like a website and not a print newspaper. It's a very nice model.
William,
That begs the question of why NYTimes.com feels the need to separately categorize the blog content from the rest of the content, i.e. the print content repurposed online.
So the news is broken up into categories. But the stuff that makes it to the homepage is the important stuff -- that the editors choose. In the case of digg, votes and perhaps some editorial involvement bring a story to the front page. That is to say that the stories on the front page are not simply all the news that is happening on the site. I go to the NYTimes.com because I trust that the editors will highlight what stories are more important at the moment. To get at more stories in a specific category, I drill down into the category homepages -- that is true of NYTimes and Digg.
But the question in my mind is are people seeking the same thing at Digg as they are at the NYTimes. When I go to the NYTimes I don't want to have to hunt and find the most important stories in a chronological list of stories. The editors have done that job for me and show me by size of headline and placement the important news of the moment. But the NYTimes homepage is not a static thing as I think you're suggesting. The headlines that are shown are frequently moved, removed, etc. as the news filters through the day.
So yes, I think you're right, the NYTimes.com is operating as some kind of dynamic newspaper and not as a blog or something equivalent. But to my mind, with the diversity and quantity of news floating through the homepage on a given day, their format helps me see stories as they evolve. There's an information hierarchy there that is key to keeping the news easily parsed. Without it, it would be a much more daunting task to get a sense of what the news of the day is.
Most blogs are in reverse chronological format, and most of them are completely random. There's a story about someone's cat followed by what they did at work or a post about the last basketball game they went to. There's no organization by content -- you have to do a lot of skimming to find the good stuff.
I think the NYTimes gets so much traffic online because they've always done a stellar job with their website. If you compare it with, say, CNN.com, it's clearly superior. CNN.com has a reverse-chrono list of 16 or so headlines in the center column at the top. It's just a block of undifferentiated text. Sixteen stories with no rhyme or reason to them. It seems like CNN is pushing their editorial work off onto the user. Let the user decide which stories are important to them. But with a relatively random list of headlines organized solely by reverse-chrono order, it takes a lot of extra parsing.
That's a difference between a blog and the NYTimes -- on a blog I get a bunch of stuff that's not really organized. But with the NYTimes website there are editors there making news judgments about what to present and how to present it. And that's why I read the NYTimes.com for the news and not some blog.
Digg, of course, has it's own problems but those are primarily problems with execution, not the model they have built.
Great post. Interesting times ahead for the media biz.
I don't think it works: unimportant news like a local car crash push down important news.
You can take a look at http://www.clarin.com
The homepage is still relevant for readers who seek out the brand directly -- that group of users is shrinking everyday, but is still sizable, especially for a premier brand like the NYT. The homepage is also emblematic of the larger print-centric approach to web publishing. The homepage is as good a place to start as any.
Shameless plug here, but I'm one of the geeks behind a new web-based feed reader called Alertle (www.alertle.com). I think it gets the river of news idea just right. Do check it out. What you want has already kind of been done.. :)
We organize around six areas: News Now, Business Now, Sports Now, Entertainment, Voices, and Community. We post the news and information about Flint Michigan as it happens, as it is reported and written/recorded. Sometimes, it is online days before it makes the newspaper.
Some folks want what is in the newspaper, so we continue to shovel those stories online to their own pages (See From The Newspapers on the left side)
It is a work in progress. Next steps include a data center with answers fo questions as basic as who is my mayor and when is the Crim or Buick Open to who gave to the presidential campaigns.
The site draws from 9 newspapers owned by the company. We often highlight what the local television stations are reporting.
I like the ideas you promote in ths article. The BBC have just launch a new home page and have asked users to give feedback - no doubt they will make adjustments based on the feedback. The use widgets and allow users to re-configure the hoe page to their liking - this, i think give the users the best of both worlds.
Derek
When they figure out how to actually make money from online readers...
I remember sitting on the other side of the mirror during a focus group of readers, one of whom said he checked our web site several times a day, "to make sure the world hadn't blown up." I don't think he'd be served by a home page that had Britney Spears's latest mishap above a nuclear explosion in Pakistan, just because the former happened 15 minutes ago and the latter 20.
I'm also irritated by web sites that seem to "game" my attention by moving stories and images around in ways designed to make them look fresh. I agree that newspapers should always be striving to remind readers of their rich content and should be making it easier for them to find.
And I agree wholeheartedly that media web sites should offer more choice to users. If users want to see what's new, by all means make it easy. Why not have a toggle button at the top that allows users to switch, the same way I can switch between the UK feed of the BBC's web site and the BBC's international feed?
Here is another reason that newspapers should use blogs. Legacy CMS (Content Management Systems) are broken; and can't keep up with the feature creep of blogs, widgets, and ranked content. Publishers should quit legacy systems and switch. It'll be less expensive.
-Dash Chang
The New Economics of Advertising
http://adEcon101.blogspot.com/