I’ll take mundane black font on white background containing though-provoking messages any day. (Fewer, simpler and larger ads would be fine, too). Even in the most visually challenging sites, important ideas will be discovered but I would not make their discovery unnecessarily difficult.
Here’s to keeping our eye on the ball, Steve. Let’s do for news in digital media what Michael Jordan did for pro basketball – take the game to a higher level. Let’s celebrate new story-forms, new uses of typography, and new models for advertising. We may even be able to defy gravity and learn how to slam-dunk.
Steve worries that shift.com’s type is harder-to-read type and that is animated ads are distractions. I worry that our news organizations have failed to create new story-forms and unique experiences on the web. The news industry’s approach to innovation has been “like putting lipstick on a bulldog,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the change and management expert at Harvard Business School, at a recent New Directions for News workshop (www.newdirectionsfornews.com).
Sites like shift.com are filling the void. Whether we agreed with its story or not, the “death of newspapers” created buzz. And for many of us who clicked to the site, shift.com was far more interesting than the bland, predictable, automated and overstuffed news sites that come from our newsrooms. The old joke rings true: if editors knew anything about design, they wouldn’t dress they way they do.
I read no less than five newspaper sites each night. I do this to stay informed and to know what the competition feels is the biggest news stories of the day. I do not, however, subscribe to the paper version of any newspaper, not even my own. Why should I? It's all old news.
I see people reading the paper on the subway each morning, and I'm constantly tempted to give them the lowdown on the things that have happened overnight. News lives on a 24 hour cycle. While America sleeps, Middle Eastern conflicts continue, battles in Afghanistan rage and international markets open/close.
Today's global citizen is media-savvy. Information is power, and we want it to be available accurately and immediately. The quality of news doesn't have to change simply because it appears on a screen rather than on the printed page.
I began my career in newspapers 13 years ago; I became a dedicated Internet user around the same time. Once these two worlds converged, I learned to appreciate the future possibilities of online news. Today, those possibilities have become reality. To switch back to the newspaper world would be like giving up my telephone and using two tin cans connected by a string.
