Jumping Fox » newspapers

Skimming goes live

Simon Wright — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:00:21 +0000

An interesting take on skimming and browsing behaviours online, the Times Skimmer is now live on the main New York Times website. In the final release they’ve added the typeface Cheltenham—familiar to readers of their print edition—to the app using Typekit along with sponsorship from Blackberry, adding the commercial aspect noticeably absent in the test version I wrote about earlier. It’s a polished evolution of the idea, very well executed.

A dubious sweepstakes

Simon Wright — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:49:21 +0000

Michael Sokolove’s article “What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?” in the New York Times Magazine tells the situation facing the US newspaper industry through the story of Philidelphia’s own papers, including the possible ignominy of being the first major US city without a daily paper.

How Times Media Group approached their redesign

Simon Wright — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:32:45 +0000

BBH Labs’ talks to Times Media Group about their redesign of The Times in 2007. Their prototyping with “Project Victoria” is a great approach to testing out new systems if you can afford it.

Listen to your users

Simon Wright — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:09:56 +0000

Among a slew of newspaper redesigns that are utilising more magazine-driven layouts popping with colour and graphics, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has launched a new design that uses more solid columns of text and smaller photos than most.

Will Alford, product design chief behind the redesign explains their thinking in this detailed summary of the redesign at Visual Editors (added emphasis is mine):

For years our industry has chased those elusive nonreaders. Our market research led us down a different path. What we’d have to do to win over those folks risked driving away our core readers.

We believe we can thrive by increasing the satisfaction of those who already engage with us regularly. To us, this meant we had to design a newspaper for people who like newspapers. If our strategy works, more of you will renew your subscriptions or purchase the paper more often or convert from single-copy customers to home subscribers.

It’s sad that something as simple as listening to your existing users seems so groundbreaking.

At the heart of any successful project is a solid understanding of your user. Sometimes they tell you things you want to hear, often it’s things you don’t like to hear–comments on the AJC’s own blog post about the changes are filled will negative feedback–but if your redesign ignore them in search on converting new readers, it’s at your peril.

Meanwhile…

Simon Wright — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:04:19 +0000

At the end of a down-beat article on the accelerating decline in circulation of the top 25 US newspapers (7% year on year) the New York Times adds a short final paragraph:

Meanwhile, the audience for newspaper Web sites continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2009, newspaper Web sites attracted more than 73 million unique visitors each month, on average, according to an analysis by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. That is a 10.5 percent increase from the first quarter of 2008.