I have a pet theory, one that is not widely shared amongst my colleagues. I think that what we now know as news sites will come to resemble what we now know as blogs. I don't mean this in the broader sense of the conversational use of blogs so much as the "newest story at the top, reverse chronological" flow of news. That's what makes sense to me as a useful way of presenting news in the era of vertical scrolling and user-determined levels of importance.
On the whole, the people I work with treat this as a pile of old tosh, and cheerfully ignore me. But the new mobile version of FT.com, which I've been checking out today on my iPhone, brings my idea to mind:
The design, to me, demonstrates the value of that blog-style design in the mobile environment. What do you want to know? The latest news. Not what a gatekeeper has deemed the most important, just the newest.It's incredibly easy to just scroll up and down the news with a flick of the thumb, or click through to anything interesting. It's simple, but very, very effective, because it understand that speed and timeliness are the key factors for news on the go.
And it's even got a nice icon for bookmarking it on the iPhone:
On the whole, the people I work with treat this as a pile of old tosh, and cheerfully ignore me. But the new mobile version of FT.com, which I've been checking out today on my iPhone, brings my idea to mind:
The design, to me, demonstrates the value of that blog-style design in the mobile environment. What do you want to know? The latest news. Not what a gatekeeper has deemed the most important, just the newest.It's incredibly easy to just scroll up and down the news with a flick of the thumb, or click through to anything interesting. It's simple, but very, very effective, because it understand that speed and timeliness are the key factors for news on the go.
And it's even got a nice icon for bookmarking it on the iPhone:
I think the way we are accessing news is changing, and I think you are right - the latest at the top will be the way to go. My mantra regarding online content for so long has been that the number one mistake that providers make is that they continually give the user what they would like to see, rather than what the user actually wants to see. The same is true in terms of an editor choosing what takes a lead. Have a look at the popularity of Slashdot as an exercise in seeing how people self disseminate.
I agree with you whole heartedly and would extend what you have said. I used to work at TIME magazine as associate web producer for the Inernational edition. The ability of editorial to fail to grasp what was going on with respect to the delivery of the news never ceased to amaze me.
Until they started using it themselves that is. Then it was if they were Christopher Columbus discovering a whole new continent and we were all supposed to be amazed at their prescience even though as vikings we had been there a thousand years before.
I think that the whole news thing will end up being like a blog but with it being filtered according to what the reciever wants to see. This is effectively already being done with mash ups but I think that the take up of this style of personalisation will accelerate. Then you will have the news but concentrating on those things that you want to see.
I very much see your idea in the recent redesign of FT.com, on which the new mobile site is based.
Interestingly though - the new-look homepage of the main website features the 'most important stories' from across the website as selected by a team of editors (or so I was told in an interview). Not quite getting rid of the gatekeepers yet...
Does the mobile site take you straight to a latest news page? and are the stories on this the same as FT.com's homepage e.g. hand-picked by editors?
Oh, I would be amazed if the gatekeepers aren't behind much of what we're seeing. In many ways, I was talking principally about the design ideology rather than the actual content.
The battle over gatekeeping has a long way to go. We're just in the early skirmishes right now. :)
Yes, and...
The Daily Telegraph (to use a figure that was given to me yesterday) produces 5,000 pieces of content a week. A bit of guidance and discoverability can be useful too!
That's why you have several different chronological streams, like the mobile FT version does. :)