The FTC is holding a two-day workshop today and tomorrow (8:30 am - 5:00 pm) to answer the above question. Today’s workshop is over, but come back tomorrow for the live webcast.
Earlier this year, informationArchitects submitted a redesign of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They pushed “a pretty tight concept around the idea of usability, readability and cross media connection,” but ultimately lost out to another design firm. Design can save newspapers, it’s been shown, but iA took it to another level, going so far as to have blue type signify keywords to lookup online for more information.
Check out the above link for more sample shots of the redesign, iA’s entire pitch in PDF, and a lengthy explanation of their guiding practices.
Last winter, Tim O’Reilly talked at Times Open, a one-day conference “exploring NYTimes.com as a news information platform.” His keynote speech stumbled through a number of provoking thoughts and questions, structured talk be damned. The 54-minute video is definitely worth a listen, but for those in a rush, here are some highlights:
What data is being thrown away without being utilized?Can the newspaper hide news that’s already been seen so the new stuff is first?
How does the service increase in value as more people use it?
What assets get better through user participation?
How can you converse with your users? e.g., is Twitter just a fancy RSS feed?
Don’t make “just another social network”. e.g., integrate outside services, don’t reinvent the wheel
Are the most read articles different from the most linked articles? Why?
How can you give status to users? Make them more than some anonymous, 1 in 35,000 commenter?
“Programmers are the new secret weapon of newspapers.”
“Our future is going to be driven by information exhaust from the devices we carry.”
Americans, it turns out, are less willing than people in many other Western countries to pay for their online news, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group.
FAIL Blog is a humor site where people submit people doing stupid things, or stupid errors / things found around the world.
This post features the Gazette in all its glory, with “Read about blahblah blah blah, Page S-2” above an article commemorating veterans… how awful is that?
We at McSweeney’s love newspapers. We love the internet, too. But we believe that print newspapers are an invaluable part of the journalistic landscape. So we’ve spent five months collaborating with dozens of reporters, designers, photographers, and authors on a 21st-century newspaper prototype.
In the six months ended Sept. 30, sales fell by 10.6 percent on weekdays and 7.5 percent on Sundays, from the period a year earlier, for several hundred papers reporting to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That means that the industry sold about 44 million copies a day — fewer than at any time since the 1940s.
This film is based off of a presentation given to the Poynter Institute.
Here’s more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_2014
Sorry about the Albino Blacksheep link…
The Reconstruction of American Journalism, a new report by Leonard Downie, Jr., and Michael Schudson in the latest issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. Downie, former executive editor of The Washington Post, was on PBS’ NewsHour last night to discuss new models of journalism with Jeffrey Brown and Nick Lemann of Columbia Journalism School.
So what links are Twitterers actually clicking on? Based on a user sample released Friday by Chitika, an online ad network, Twitter users most frequently accessed links directing to information about current events and news (28.49 percent).
In January 2009 we were invited to take part in a paid pitch for the print redesign for the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. All in all five agencies took part in the pitch. We were the only UX oriented agency. The story of a beautiful failure.
