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Digital ink

While browsing around the Post-Dispatch website today, I muttered an observation that I’ve made a number of times before: “This site sucks.” The website’s layout has been revamped twice that I can recall, but fundamental problems persist and, in some cases, have been made worse. The newshole appears cramped and crowded, framed as it is by two oppressive blue bars and an overbearing header. There seems to be an active aversion to white space, and the effect is downright claustrophobic. The news itself is presented with little sense of flow or hierarchy. The various elements seem to compete for the reader’s attention, with the net result of having no particular item stand out. It’s a perfect example of trying to do too much all at once, and not doing any one of them very well.

The P-D is hardly alone in this. The worst-kept secret in journalism is that newspaper websites are almost uniformly bad. Even the sites that have been held up as the best by the National Newspaper Association - such as those of the Washington Post, the L. A. Times, and the Boston Globe - are as jumbled as car wrecks. In a medium that depends so heavily on appearance as the Web, creating sites that are as reader-hostile as the average digital newspaper is bad business.

I ran across an essay from last year that describes the basic dilemma of online papers:

>Newspaper websites are designed to look, essentially, like online versions of newspapers. Like newspapers, they present their material - news, features, sports - in descending order of what the editor perceives as the reader’s interest in the subject: The section A, above the fold story from the dead-tree edition is the top-center item on the website; the next story comes in below; the lead sports or special interest or politics or biz item comes in below that, depending on the news, or, more accurately, how the editorial staff decides to present the news.

Across the top of the webpage, there are menu links which are analogous to the major sections of the print edition. It makes sense - if you’re used to operating in the world of print - which, naturally, is newspapers’ only frame of reference. And in most cases, the newspapers’ online editions are perfectly capable transliterations to the online world - almost as if the paper is being scanned and plopped on a web page (although the Strib [Minneapolis Star-Tribune] apparently plans to make things even worse - creating, literally, a scan of the daily paper. You get all of the disadvantages of the print newspaper (linear, paginated access to stories, visual searching for pieces of content) and all the problems you get online (slow downloads, exacerbated by the size what has to be a big scanned or Java version of the paper).

In other words - they want to take a bad idea and make it even worse.

Incidentally, the P-D site - like those of many other papers - does provide a PDF of the front page of the dead-tree edition du jour. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

Back to the point: Newspapers are hidebound institutions, resistant to change in part because the reading public resists change. This helps explain why a newspaper’s Web version is just a transliteration of the paper edition. But the way that people consume information online - randomly, superficially, quite literally browsing - is radically different from the manner in which they read print, and newspapers haven’t really caught up to that yet.

There are some few examples of better design scattered about the Web, however. My favorite is the site for the International Herald Tribune. This is a design that does not try to do everything at once - which may speak to the presumed sophistication of its readers as much as anything - and even more importantly, does not try to be an exact copy of a newspaper on a screen. The main headlines are clearly segregated and given generous white space. The font size is not overly large (the size can be easily adjusted by the reader using his/her browser preferences in any event), allowing for a cleaner look. Clicking the “sections” link on the masthead bar provides the reader with quick access to the other departments of the paper without crowding them all onto the front page. Other important sections, like business and editorials, are subordinated to the main stories but readily available. It’s a site designed for people who want information without having to wade around to get it, and it’s an example that has much to teach the P-D and other papers.

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