Month: March 2007

Site redesign: Wired gets wierd

Wired has a well-earned reputation for pushing the design envelope with its magazine. Now the same can be said for Wired‘s redesigned website. The redesign hasn’t gone over too well with some readers. Comments include:

I just opened up your site for the first time in a few days. Hate to say it but the new layout stinks.

To which middle school art class did you farm this out?

No. No. No. Bad Wired. Surely this is some cruel joke because you withheld pizza and caffeine from the html coders, yes?

If nothing else, Wired’s experiment should offer solace to college and university web designers who suffer through user complaints any time they redesign — or sometimes just tweak — their school sites.

Thanks to CyberJournalist for the tip.

The State of the News Media, 2007: 7 trends

Last week, the Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report, which notes seven major trends to watch. Here’s a summary of them:

  • News organizations need to do more to think through the implications of this new era of shrinking ambitions. The move toward building audience around “franchise” areas of coverage or other traits is a logical response to fragmentation and can, managed creatively, have journalistic value. To a degree, journalism’s problems are oversupply. … But something gained means something lost, especially as newsrooms get smaller.
  • The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive about developing a new economic model. The signs are clearer that advertising works differently online than in older media. Finding out about goods and services on the Web is an activity unto itself, like using the yellow pages, and less a byproduct of getting news, such as seeing a car ad during a newscast.
  • The key question is whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining industry or an emerging one in transition. … If news companies do not assert their own vision here, including making a case and taking risks, their future will be defined by those less invested in and passionate about news.
  • There are growing questions about whether the dominant ownership model of the last generation, the public corporation, is suited to the transition newsrooms must now make.
  • The Argument Culture is giving way to something new, the Answer Culture. [Applause! – ed] … A growing pattern has news outlets, programs and journalists offering up solutions, crusades, certainty and the impression of putting all the blur of information in clear order for people.
  • Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics.
  • While journalists are becoming more serious about the Web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored. A content study of more than three dozen news sites offers more details.