{"id":346,"date":"2001-10-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2001-10-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/adding-nuances-to-back-to-basics\/"},"modified":"2001-10-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2001-10-05T00:00:00","slug":"adding-nuances-to-back-to-basics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/adding-nuances-to-back-to-basics\/","title":{"rendered":"Adding nuances to “back to basics”"},"content":{"rendered":"

October 4, 2001<\/strong> In the last blog, I argued that September 11 burst the seams of professional news sites & that these sites could learn from the contrasting success of blogs. Here are some other perspectives:<\/p>\n

1) Simon Crane, with 15 years experience as a UK journalist and editor, agrees that site design too often exists \u201cto serve the tastes of the designers rather than the users<\/a>.\u201d But the context and interactive features offered by publication web sites shouldn\u2019t be purged in the rush to blog-like simplicity.<\/p>\n

2) Corporate ego, not designers, may be to blame for traditional news sites\u2019 over-engineering and brand-bloat. Photographer Reid Stott writes, \u201cnews has become obscured by heavy handed attempts at graphic branding that generate more clutter and confusion with poorly placed content<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

3) Book-design opinionado Dean Allen highlighted the \u201curgency and directness\u201d of CNN\u2019s September 11 site on his funny and insight-filled blog www.textism.com<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s such pure logic in the stripped design.\u201d Don’t miss his link to MSN’s September 11 site and this comment: “You can picture some worthless little editor, sweating bullets, if I pull Elton John will I lose my job?”<\/p>\n

4) Blogs are unreliable. Northcliffe’s Keith Perch acknowledges that \u201cwe are all guilty of overdesign<\/a>\u201d and cites his own experience of multiplying a site\u2019s traffic by stripping out whizzy visuals. While agreeing that publishers can learn from blogs, he thinks the blog standard is too low to satisfy the average reader. \u201cThe truth is that many (most?) people do want their information edited – that’s what they pay for in newspapers. And they want it to be accurate and reliable.\u201d Perch complains that many blogs \u201care inconsistent, links are broken, and they can take you inadvertently to places you don’t want to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

4) Blogs distill a reality too fragmented for a single organization to comprehend, says San Jose Mercury News\u2019 columnist Dan Gilmore. Readers of weblogs on September 11 were \u201cwere witnessing — and in many cases were also part of — journalism’s future.\u201d Bloggers know \u201cthat our readers, listeners and viewers collectively know more, vastly more, than we do<\/a>,\u201d says Dan.<\/p>\n

6) The blog, as a diary of events, captures something missed by the computerized information-sorting schema used by most professional news sites. After rereading his own blog of September 11<\/a> long-time blogger Dave Winer noted \u201cit’s good to have a record of the events as they happened<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s amplify this point. It\u2019s GREAT to have a record of events “as they happened”… and great to be able to peruse the strata of one individual\u2019s experience of those events.<\/p>\n

The blog\u2019s diary-like stacking of events is easy to take for granted\u2026 but this structure may be a key virtue.<\/p>\n

Traditional publishers, scrambling daily to make room for cargo-loads of fresh-arriving news, shove their old product into a giant warehouses, from which it can be later extracted only through powerful search algorithms. But brute searching power can\u2019t replicate the natural rhythm of scrolling back through the chronological record.<\/p>\n

The blog\u2019s chronological news sorting fits well with innate human story-telling (aka information-processing) habits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

October 4, 2001 In the last blog, I argued that September 11 burst the seams of professional news sites & that these sites could learn from the contrasting success of blogs. Here are some other perspectives: 1) Simon Crane, with 15 years experience as a UK journalist and editor, agrees that site design too often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressflex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}