The difference between the New York Times and you and me? It has history worth scrolling through. The Times switched to Timeline on its Facebook page this week, and suddenly a meaningless design change became a killer way to navigate the past (go ahead, click down to your birth day/year!). Keith Wagstaff says more brands should do these things: “Surely storied fashion lines such as Lanvin and Yves Saint Laurent have immense archives; a Timeline full of vintage photo shoots and fashion shows would be far more interesting than anything on their current websites.”
>>Mandy Jenkins offers nuts and bolts tips for news orgs who want to do their own Timelines. Kim Wilson has tips for TV stations. (If this replaces 90 percent of TV news websites, whoever designed Timeline should get a Nobel.)
• Vanity Fair’s big Washington Post story is making the rounds on PDF, but that hasn’t stopped people from blogging about it. Erik Wemple at the Post summed up the feelings of a lot of people in his newsroom (“a nothingburger with a side of rehash” one friend there called it; book critic Ron Charles had a similar gripe) with a post on how author Sarah Ellison touched on all the classic Post-in-decline themes but didn’t bring much new. I think the piece did a good job of defining a central tension at the Post — whether it’s a local or national paper. Someone claiming to be Katharine Graham‘s former assistant comments on Jim Romenesko‘s blog that a Warren Buffett anecdote in the piece — about how Graham couldn’t draw a map of the U.S. — surely can’t be true. || Related: Publisher Katharine Weymouth spoke at Indiana University on Tuesday:
“I have an extremely committed team,” Weymouth said. “I honestly don’t know what I would do without them. I know that if I died or something drastic happened, the paper would still run as strong as if I were totally fine. We believe in getting the story out there for our consumers, and we do it with a passion that makes working at the Post a joy for me.”
• Edith Bouvier update: Le Figaro reporter still believed to be in Homs. (If you read French, here’s a little more info on the so-far stymied attempts to get her out.)
• E.J. Graff explains why VIDA’s count of women’s bylines matters: “…check out the world around you. All-male and 90-percent male panels convene every day. Sometimes they’re called ‘Congress.’ Sometimes they’re called your newspaper. And they’re giving you a false picture of your world.”
• The Star of Malaysia apologizes for accidentally running a photo of Erykah Badu with the word “Allah” temporarily tattooed on her shoulders. “Unfortunately, the editors who used the Badu photograph are non-Muslims and they did not recognise the word ‘Allah’ in Arabic,” says an editorial. The government banned Badu’s planned concert in Kuala Lumpur as a result of that photo.
• RIP Amid Capeci, art director at Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, and other outlets. He was 51; a wake is planned for him Friday in Port Chester, N.Y. Capeci talked about newsweeklies’ routes to survival in 2008: “the newsmags have to bring their own content to the table. The days of rehashing the week’s news is long gone.”
• Finally, enjoy this Guardian video that imagines how the paper would cover the story of the Three Little Pigs today, part of their “open journalism” project:
