psmith, journalist

The news industry has a definitions problem.

A newspaper is not a newspaper in its online form, but Guardian.co.uk and WSJ.com are both referred to as online newspapers. The staff responsible for these digital appendages are just as obsessed as print colleagues with the appearence of their “front page” and the subsequent pages, presumably hidden just beneath your screen.

Nuno A. Vargas from Barcelona University asks, in an abstract from an interesting research paper (spotted via my erstwhile colleague @Martinstabe):

Are today’s online newspapers embracing the web fully as a new medium or are they anchored to the paper metaphor, disregarding the possibilities of the online platform and leaving the users with a poorer information experience?

Should, he goes on, information be “presented in the same format no matter the nature of its content?” This is a key point that The Organs Formerly Known As Newspapers are grappling with. Do you – this is the current solution – divide all your content into different sections and let users sail their merry way through the sea of words as they please, much like a multi-section weekend newspaper?

What about an algorithm-based content that knows what content different readers (and advertisers) like best? And, as the iPad is demonstrating, pictures and video are just as powerful and compelling for story-telling, so what’s with all the focus on text coming first all the time? As Vargas puts it:

The online platform permits a wider spectrum of approaches to news feeds and a paper-based attitude will fail, for obvious reasons, to fully fulfill the new medium’s potential.

But he doesn’t just criticise – Vargas has a suggestion: don’t just tell, filter: “Today, information can be produced and sent out in different forms and shapes. Using efficient and compact modules of images, sound and text, the online journalist [can] inform his audience in a thorough and accurate manner.”

Vargas quotes Aron Pilhofer, head of the Interactive News Technologies Group at the New York Times who apparently said: “Unedited data is information that cannot be accessed.”

The killer point for Vargas is that online newspapers “make that data visible to the user in the best way possible, allowing for that same user to make his owndecisions,turning him into a role player.”

This is exactly what Guardian.co.uk has done on several occasions – through its MPs’ expenses crowd-sourcing, for example, and the on-going Open Data API project. But then The Guardian’s online subs still fret over how their front page looks – indeed, organic front page entries are one of the most common traffic source for most news sites, so that attitude does make sense. But for how much longer will that be the case?

For his full paper, Vargas interviewed some 60 academics and media professionals and the precis linked to above promises the full version is coming soon. More on that, hopefully, soon.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How print dominates the design of newspaper websites (reportr.net)