Well having been in the person in charge of a major news website myself I can say we all have lovely designs like this pinned to the walls next our desks.
And while I really like his designs and have turned to Andy many times for inspiration, there are some serious context problems... and while I'm bored and off work I might as well write a critique...
I had an near identical sports section to the one he designed pinned to me wall. But I can say he's screwed a few things up, gallery needs to be higher, users can't find a gallery that low (I know user testing surprises them hell out me to), no ads again. To use templating that image has to be shrunk, the quality you get through from external sources if often extremely poor, a reality he doesn't seem to have considered. Nothing screams amateur news like big pixalated images some non technical journo uploaded, and credibility is your only asset really.
Another reality is the business requires as many ad units as you can fit on a page, big media is expensive. Way more than a blog with 10 or so staff. Flying people all over the country, investigating stories, hotel rooms. Its like covering CES every day, which for most tech blogs would be there biggest yearly expense. Moan all you will but most people are out of touch with exact what it takes to make decent news.
And you can't win an argument about ads, you get dragged in front of finance, and if you convince them sales will drag you in front of the board, if you win that you get dragged in front of agencies to justify changes which may effect upcoming campaigns. Its a horrible process and really have to have solid arguments and research, essentially you are risking entire revenue streams, for what in a lot of cases isn't even break even business.
He's got what appears to be a lot of promoted content, thats expensive from a support point of view. I had a guy working under me whose job was literally to make the decision about what story superseeded the next.
The back lash you get from people for having a story up too long or not long enough is amazing. I've been called every name under the sun. Your audience isn't a defined well behaved demographic at all. Its like 4chan discussing politics, just a complete mess always on the attack.
..but at least when thanks comes its usually really good, for example this year I got a hand made Christmas card from the Indonesian Fishing Association for getting a reporter in touch with them. Somehow it made up for a year of insults. It was real touching.
The only real solution, and we worked damned hard with Google on this is indexing getting people to the page directly, forgetting all about overview pages and landing pages.
We ended up constructing a 24 hour social media team. We pushed the news via automation, blood, sweat, and tears to the people. And Google rewarded us, we entered the elite list of news suppliers whom google monitor for breaking stories. It works, it really does, but its hard work. I bet there aren't many people hear who have brought Google employees to an argument with your boss ;)
Anyway he's also under estimating the sheer volume of stories being generated. He's designed a nice blog template, not something that produces several hundred of stories a day over dozens and dozens of subsection. He's hasn't considered the scale, and the unreliability of content. You can do editorial pages like that for major events, but not the daily drab. The real solution to the problem was as noted above social engineering, you need to get people (super nodes) who act as conduits to propagate good stories for you.
The next is the infographics. Again beautiful, I used to kill for decent info graphics coming in. If I wasn't snowed under I'd try and create them myself.
But the reality is graphic designer can't do it, they have huge work loads already, and remember you can't just hire more staff, its break even business. THEN you need a subject matter expert to assembly it and give it to the graphic designer.
Infographics takes time, and its something that Google and Twitter have taken away from news journalists by the creation of an attention economy. You need to break a story immediately or you run the risk of not covering your production costs.
You don't have time to crunch numbers, you are literally scrambling for eyeballs to stay in business. You can do it with editorials fine, and one trick I learnt quick was guest bloggers are GOLD. They often bring a crowd with them, they often have great researched stories, infographics you name it. So it became my goal to build those relationships.
But alas 3 months without weekends, high pressure workload, high pressure targets, unyielding worldwide competition take a toll. So I quit. Theres still an open position for me if I want to return, but I don't think I'm ready just yet ;)
EDIT: I don't mean to be harsh towards Andy. I love his work, and his intellectual exercise into improvement is great. I even forwarded it onto my old team for review.
But what I guess my point is sometimes there a reason why things are crap, and fixing may be a hell of a lot harder the moment you try than you expected.
So don't judge people/teams to harshly, instead offer a hand like Andy has done, sometimes they need it (especially in big media)
Also probably worth mentioning while on the subject all my research and experience added up to designs that are very close to Al Jeezera.
Perhaps I just favor it because it resembles my own thinking but I believe they have one of the best designed news sites out there: http://english.aljazeera.net
Clean, crisp, clear, all gridded up nice and tidy. Handling information overload well.
Being a new kid on the block, no legacy systems or clients to contended with, learning from every one else's mistakes I assume play a huge part in why Al Jeezera looks so good.
If I can remember the worst news site I've seen I'll post it. Its a state level TV station from America somewhere, shocking abuses in design. It was like trying to read at a pocket dictionary from 10 feet away, total text chaos.
One of the best online newspaper designs I've seen recently is the Indian paper The Hindu (http://www.thehindu.com/). While most Indian newspapers will give you eye-cancer just by looking at them (ex: The Times of India, which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country also has one of the most horrible online editions, plastered with spammy ads and horrible layout). The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. (The original design was like a 1995 webpage)
Also up there in my list is NPR (http://www.npr.org/) and PBS (http://www.pbs.org/). Not technically newspapers, but their pages are mostly about news delivery.
The Hindu looked bad too, a couple of years ago. They started testing a new interface at beta.thehindu.com for sometime before using the new interface for everyone.
The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. True.
I love having images to scan instead of just headlines (which Andy seems to detest), so when my local newspaper redesigned their page, I fell in love http://www.sydsvenskan.se/ (Swedish)
Breaking news at the very top, then a top story, then the other top 4 stories. Then a simple scrolling list of the latest news by time descending (great when you check in a few times a day).
Of course, as a local paper they have a lot less content making it a much easier job than something on the scale of the NYT.
Yep, I'm working on a political community lobby site ATM.
Essentially I am planning on creating a build your laws site. More or less a wiki with better forum support and auditing control.
A major talk back radio station in my country is prepared to support it if I finished it. I also looked after them as my role was looking after the "current affairs" suite, which included radio as well as TV.
But I have to build it myself. I have to many features that using a turn-key solution would be more harmful than helpful, and a wiki isn't really that hard to build. But some of the features I want I have never seen implemented else where so it may be a trial by fire with lots of problems.
I can easily get funding for it because of its ability to be high profile, but a conflict of interest arises taking money. For it to work I need to be able to take a stance against other lobby groups, takings a stand for the community, make the user feel like they are changing the world. And TBH if it can make noise in the talk back crowd then hot topics will probably end getting shunted into politicians faces.
Taking money corporates instantly devalues my only assets however. I'll work that out though, lots of talk still to be done, and I need a web concept up. Current all my work has been at a database level handling versioning, commenting within comments, hierarchy structures and stuff. Designing a living document is quite fun :)
I also own a really decent domain name which I plan to launch political satire off. Basically many journos I know I want an outlet to say things that the eat at them every day. You could say something along the lines of Stephen Colbert but done news/blog style. Thats on my back burner though, I'll get to it when I get to it, which maybe never.
I must admit that it was with some amused curiosity that the primary thing removed to make the site cleaner was "ads". That along with opening paragraphs were the two major changes in layout.
It seems that the author thought that his solitary 'subscribe' button would provide enough income to support a large media organisation and make it nicely profitable - all internet commentary to the contrary.
The other thing I took away was from the navigation bar. So what if it's long? If I'm a regular user, I prefer a mildly long navigation bar as long as the items stay in the same place. I can then get to the subsection I want very quickly, without having to wait for some eye-pleasing pretty animation slowly exposing the subs of some higher heading. Obviously this is a highly personal issue, but his 'prettier' version of doing this involved horizontal nested menus that take up a monstrous amount of vertical space. Most of us have widescreens (not tallscreens) on our non-mobile devices - and woe betide those folks using netbooks.
I think you're right - it's a nice layout for a blog, but doesn't really suit a rapidly-changing, info-packed news site.
What's your take on the strong emphasis he puts on separation of "news" and "opinion" and whether an editorial team could adequately resolve that? As a reader the distinction seems very artificial. I can see how senior newspaper executives might like his argument about emphasising the volume of "editorial writers ... promoted as exclusive, valuable properties" though.
Editorials and blogs are the same thing. They are opinion pieces, they are not news, they are bias, and often have an agenda. Sometimes they are satire. That isn't news its entertainment.
From a purist point of view the news should be factual and impartial. Editorials fail to impartial most of the time.
You have to choose what side of the fence you sit on, are you the BBC or are you Fox News? are you news or entertainment?
I support editorials because they are usually done by journalists who love there craft and do so on there own time, brings job satisfaction to staff.
It also helps pay for the craft to continue. I'm not so hot on celebrity bloggers though, thats just cheap money grabbing most of the time that can devalue the brand. Subject matter experts like sports stars I'll support, but bringing in some TV star to comment fashion is a joke.
But it works, and you have to take the bad with the good.
And most importantly because I think person X is a moronic jerk doesn't make me correct. It causes debate which is good, a long as debate isn't distraction. Which often happens.
I agree that provocative regular columnists and guest feature writers are the equivalent of bloggers, and his bold use of regular columnists' names is one of the things I like about his design. I guess that my original point was more that the tendency to editorialise in and around news articles themselves is widespread in modern news media (my perceptions being shaped by a UK print media that wears its biases on its sleeve) and the readers seem to demand it; it seems odd for a designer to come along and assert editors ought to separate anything with any semblance of commentary into a distinct section "separated from news" and apparently subordinate (at least in page position) to it.
Personally I don't like seperating them into "news" and "entertainment". I wouldn't ever class an opinion piece as news, however it is possible for an opinion piece to not be entertaining (as in, not try to be) and to actually be a useful aspect of finding out about current events.
Do you think there would be a market for rapidly produced lo-fi infographics? I'm thinking it might be possible approaching it somewhat like XKCD does with comics.
I can say your teams work has been in many more arguments and importance decision than you realize. If I go back to work for my ex employer I may just reach out to you.
Still 50/50 on it but writing that review has reminded me of the good times and not just the bad :)
And while I really like his designs and have turned to Andy many times for inspiration, there are some serious context problems... and while I'm bored and off work I might as well write a critique...
I had an near identical sports section to the one he designed pinned to me wall. But I can say he's screwed a few things up, gallery needs to be higher, users can't find a gallery that low (I know user testing surprises them hell out me to), no ads again. To use templating that image has to be shrunk, the quality you get through from external sources if often extremely poor, a reality he doesn't seem to have considered. Nothing screams amateur news like big pixalated images some non technical journo uploaded, and credibility is your only asset really.
Another reality is the business requires as many ad units as you can fit on a page, big media is expensive. Way more than a blog with 10 or so staff. Flying people all over the country, investigating stories, hotel rooms. Its like covering CES every day, which for most tech blogs would be there biggest yearly expense. Moan all you will but most people are out of touch with exact what it takes to make decent news.
And you can't win an argument about ads, you get dragged in front of finance, and if you convince them sales will drag you in front of the board, if you win that you get dragged in front of agencies to justify changes which may effect upcoming campaigns. Its a horrible process and really have to have solid arguments and research, essentially you are risking entire revenue streams, for what in a lot of cases isn't even break even business.
He's got what appears to be a lot of promoted content, thats expensive from a support point of view. I had a guy working under me whose job was literally to make the decision about what story superseeded the next.
The back lash you get from people for having a story up too long or not long enough is amazing. I've been called every name under the sun. Your audience isn't a defined well behaved demographic at all. Its like 4chan discussing politics, just a complete mess always on the attack.
..but at least when thanks comes its usually really good, for example this year I got a hand made Christmas card from the Indonesian Fishing Association for getting a reporter in touch with them. Somehow it made up for a year of insults. It was real touching.
The only real solution, and we worked damned hard with Google on this is indexing getting people to the page directly, forgetting all about overview pages and landing pages.
We ended up constructing a 24 hour social media team. We pushed the news via automation, blood, sweat, and tears to the people. And Google rewarded us, we entered the elite list of news suppliers whom google monitor for breaking stories. It works, it really does, but its hard work. I bet there aren't many people hear who have brought Google employees to an argument with your boss ;)
Anyway he's also under estimating the sheer volume of stories being generated. He's designed a nice blog template, not something that produces several hundred of stories a day over dozens and dozens of subsection. He's hasn't considered the scale, and the unreliability of content. You can do editorial pages like that for major events, but not the daily drab. The real solution to the problem was as noted above social engineering, you need to get people (super nodes) who act as conduits to propagate good stories for you.
The next is the infographics. Again beautiful, I used to kill for decent info graphics coming in. If I wasn't snowed under I'd try and create them myself.
But the reality is graphic designer can't do it, they have huge work loads already, and remember you can't just hire more staff, its break even business. THEN you need a subject matter expert to assembly it and give it to the graphic designer.
Infographics takes time, and its something that Google and Twitter have taken away from news journalists by the creation of an attention economy. You need to break a story immediately or you run the risk of not covering your production costs.
You don't have time to crunch numbers, you are literally scrambling for eyeballs to stay in business. You can do it with editorials fine, and one trick I learnt quick was guest bloggers are GOLD. They often bring a crowd with them, they often have great researched stories, infographics you name it. So it became my goal to build those relationships.
But alas 3 months without weekends, high pressure workload, high pressure targets, unyielding worldwide competition take a toll. So I quit. Theres still an open position for me if I want to return, but I don't think I'm ready just yet ;)
EDIT: I don't mean to be harsh towards Andy. I love his work, and his intellectual exercise into improvement is great. I even forwarded it onto my old team for review.
But what I guess my point is sometimes there a reason why things are crap, and fixing may be a hell of a lot harder the moment you try than you expected.
So don't judge people/teams to harshly, instead offer a hand like Andy has done, sometimes they need it (especially in big media)