Washington Post Redesign as a Wiki
After our last posts on the future of news we have been asked again and again to illustrate:
- What does a newspaper as a wiki look like?
- How can newspapers bring their online and offline identity together?
- What is appropriate advertisement?
- What is an easy to read newspaper website?
Of course we are still not allowed to show the work we did for our client. So instead we made a sketch this afternoon of how the Washington Post might look as a wiki made by iA:
Left: Newspaper
Right: iA Sketch
In the meantime it still looks like this:
Left: Newspaper
Right: Actual website
Here is the direct comparison:
Left: Actual Design
Right: iA Sketch
Now of course you want to look at it from close, don’t you? Click on the image to see a 1:1 version:
Please note that:
- this is an just a sketch that illustrates the possibilities as we’ve discussed.
- what you see is a .jpg made from this PDF (5MB). The actual HTML dummy with the original design looks much nicer, as it scales and displays the fonts clearer (only screen fonts used, of course).
- iA is actually working on a project that looks very similar to this, meaning: a) You are not allowed to copy this in any way, and b) we cannot show you the detail of the wiki interface just yet.
- No: Wiki doesn’t mean that users cannot do whatever they like, the wiki is a publishing tool for editors, first of all.
- No: Users will not need to use wikicode. Believe it or not: We found an elegant solution for that.
- Yes, users will be able to see the history of an article.
- We are going to post a flowchart on how a newspaper wiki works very soon.
- Before critizising (not enough ads, not enough stuff, too much like the paper, Oliver is an idiot, etc) please read this, or, if you’re in a hurry, this.
I usually don’t do the Digg hustling, but as the idea of this entry was mainly to get a lot of feedback in order to improve, please: Digg it, bookmark it, reddit, but most of all: Please leave a comment.
4.3.2007
22:03
very nice indeed!
4.3.2007
22:11
Looks very good! Layout is “em” “px” or “%” based?
4.3.2007
22:13
% (grid) and em (font). I only have the (secret) original in HTML for now.
4.3.2007
22:35
I would like to recommend using “em” based so called “elastic layout” to meet each user need. Just my 5 cents.
Elastic Design Fixed or fluid width? Elastic!
4.3.2007
23:09
I am droooooling.
4.4.2007
01:27
Nice design. I never realized that the Washington Post had different logos for print and web. That doesn’t make much sense.
If you’re not working for WaPo maybe hopefully they will at least see this post and take a few notes.
4.4.2007
02:26
Some really nice Ideas here, but I think the work just really starts after that. All the questions on different handling of Reader written and Journalist written content, models how online only content would (could?) find its way into the print edition and how there could be a model of getting paid for wrting as a reader etc. And I still somehow hope the future of all Newspapers online won’t be to look 80% like the New York Times. And looks like you’re still getting to read your brand eins over there … best, uli
4.4.2007
03:31
Beautiful design.
However, the idea of using wiki technology for news scares me to death. That goes aganist everything online journalism thought leaders (like Adrian Holovaty) have ben preaching. In journalism, data needs to be stored in the most structured means possible. Wikis are, by definition, for storing unstructured data.
How would you store election results in a wiki? Would I be able to sort and browse that data in any way possible? How would you store birth announcement? Would I be able to search by hospital? Gender? How would you store photos in a wiki? Would I be able to get an RSS feed to photos by a particular photographer? How would you create a business directory, < href=”htp://lawrencemarketplace.com”>like the one we just finished, with a wiki? You can’t. Wikis are for unstructured data. Journalism requires structured data to be done well.
I love points one through nine on your 10 Myths post. And I love the design for The Post here. But I’m sorry — the idea of using wiki technology for newspaper is just horrific.
4.4.2007
03:50
i know your position about paper-based media, but if the Washington Post becomes a wiki, that means they will have to scrap the paper edition, right? if all new articles and breaking news appear first on the website, I wonder what’s the incentative to buy the paper?
also, do you involve user-generated content to be published on their website?
4.4.2007
06:16
Uli,
We don’t buy papers because they have special information, we buy them because they’re unbeatably nice to read. Yeah, still read brand eins; they have all info online for free too btw and people still buy the magazine. I always get a copy when I’m in Europe. They still rule. There is nothing like it in English.
Jeff, Scares you doesn’t it. Well, don’t be afraid. It does work. There are a lot of details I cannot talk about yet that make most of your fears disappear. It has been done before in a radical way (http://www.mediawiki.org), but we deradicalized it and improved it a lot. In our version the editor is fully in control. I’ll post a schematic soon.
Heri, No scrapping paper editions. iA loves paper. Everyone loves paper. Using the Online Edition as a publishing tool (social filter) for the paper (as a filtered edition of the web) is the idea. Instead of killing paper: Integrating user comments (the very next day) and contents (after being edited) in the paper edition. Yeah, I am a big paper fan.
4.4.2007
07:04
Sure papers don’t have selling argument of containing special information anymore but instead I think it is the nature of the information which makes printing reasonable or not. A magazine with long, researched and well set text can be all over the net, I will buy it (brand-eins.de - sorry in german). A Magazine with a Website updated hourly I sure wont. My point is, if this is about Information Architecture, moving Newspapers into smart and adapting Wikis will get more interesting as the tennants move In. Im lookig forward to watch this development here and especially where the architects work will end. Hello from Bauhaus.
4.4.2007
07:19
Oliver, Great mockup. After reading your reply in the original post about 10 newspaper myths, your follow-up posts, and examining the linked image, I’m really starting to see where you’re going with the concepts. What you’re proposing will definitely require a huge paradigm shift in the industry where the wiki-edited content drives the paper edition of the following day. Are you able to expand on the expected workflow of a typical piece?
I like your inclusion of some of the interactive functionality often associated with digg and newsvine such as popularity and raw scoring of pieces. The Yesterday and Tomorrow links in the masthead really says a lot about your view of the newspaper as an ongoing living, fluid record of the zeitgeist rather than a collection of static snapshots. I don’t know why but those two links up there are really making me rethink the whole concept of daily print media.
If I can critique, I think your placement of an article above the masthead is a poor move. This is something Wired has started using in their magazine as well and I think it really diminishes the strength of the brand. With online editions of newspapers starting to converge on similar design, the masthead integrity increasingly counts for a lot.
4.4.2007
09:01
Thanks Patrick,
I agree. The placement of an article above the masthead is a bad move. I only featured it because the Washington Post has it in their print edition. The original newspaper we are working on doesn’t feature such a thing. They have another characterstic thing going on in the header section that works much better for websites…
Actually, I think that placement of an article above the masthead is a bad move in print as well.
I am happy you saw the today tomorrow links. This is I believe, one of the keys to the whole idea.
As for the process. We don’t need to change the whole editing process. We can go step by step. The flexible access and publishing rights in wikimedia make it possible.
The plan is, to start testing the system with a somewhat smaller edition (a weekly magazine) and test and optimize it to the point where it can be easily adapted for the more audacious newspaper.
As I just heard from my client, we might be able to give out test accounts to the magazine version at around the 20th of April.
I’d be very happy to give you access to one of those test accounts.
4.4.2007
09:15
Uli,
The idea is to use the website as a refining tool to make the paper edition even more appealing.
One thing websites (or even e-paper for that matter) will never be able to do is deliver the physical quality of pictures and text.
The magazine project we are working on cannot be replaced by an online edition, as long as they continue to use their high class text and picture material.
What the website can do for them is: - get user feedback before printing, and improve the quality - get high end user contributions from professionals from all sorts of places (I am really looking forward to write some texts for that magazine myself) - simplify the editing and data collection and publishing planning process (all online) - make the production process transparent - to give them additional space for texts and pictures they didn’t have enough space to print. - increase search engine performance - get users more active and involved
The final control is in the hand of the editors. The wiki combined with a newspaper/magazine with a real life subscription service gives you more control over the reality of user profiles. You restrict the access to the subscribers to make sure that people write under their real names. As soon as you take away the anonymity, the bullshit usually stops.
Filtering, that is what we need, and that is why we need more journalists and editors in the future not less.
More info here.
4.4.2007
17:35
Thanks Oliver, I’d be very happy to receive a test account.
I’m really eager to see where print and online journalism is headed. Some level of customer-participation is inevitable but I don’t think anyone has nailed down the perfect system (yet).
I take it you’ve already seen Wikipedia’s Tomorrow page? It’s an interesting case study of preparation of the next day’s content though the tiny pool of people that have any say or editing ability on it is probably one of the least wiki-like aspects of the ‘pedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page/Tomorrow
User participation incentive is going to be an issue. digg has a bit of gaming behavior incentive associated with the satisfaction of getting a post on the front page or having a high score in your comments. If there’s an editor involved who will probably be disregarding a large majority of edits and comments, will there be sufficient incentives for users to participate in the process?
I would advise looking at the community at Ask Metafilter. For an answer website, it’s got a really high signal-to-noise ratio for questions posed by members who pay the $5 fee. The content can be read by all, but only those who pay the entrance fee can ask questions and submit comments. It’s not a large cost but it’s a sufficient barrier to keeping most of the trolls away and encourages members to participate thoughtfully. And unlike the NY Times Select where you’re paying on a monthly basis simply for access to content, this type of low one-time fee is paying to unlock more features. Overall, it becomes a two-step filter for the editors where the $5 keeps the bad behavior out and allows the editor to focus on evaluating and picking out meaningful edits and comments.
4.4.2007
21:43
Oliver, thank you for that article and the nice mockup!
There’s just one thing I have to complain about: In my opinion the rating system is the killer feature of that new kind of online newspaper. I think it’s certainly more important than the number of comments to an article and likely more important than the editor. So why hide it in all articles that are not featured in the main column?
Oh, and you used a German time format (14.30 Uhr) in the last two articles above the ad. If that was done by intention: why?
Kind regards from Austria, Phil
4.4.2007
22:05
Thanks Philipp,
Why hide the point number in the side column: Simply to make things more scannable. Adding points every where would make the page messy. You can vote on the article page only, btw.
Time Format: That’s is just me not getting enough sleep and start writing stuff in German instead of English.
4.5.2007
00:08
[…] Washington Post Redesign as a Wiki. Hypothetical redesign. […]
4.5.2007
13:19
the feature I like best is the “Tomorrow” button.
Really makes it feel like daily content, instead of a jumbled mess like most online news.
4.5.2007
14:33
But is it daily content? Why do you want it to feel ike daily content? At the newspapers I work at, we post stories ’round the clock. There’s nothing “daily” about our online news operation. That’s the whole point of online news — 24/7, baby.
Having “Daily” news is a concept from the print world. We need to embrace the web as it’s own thing, not just shovel the same concepts that we’ve been doing for 100 years into this new medium.
Frankly, this whole threads reads like it’s written by people who have never spent an hour in a newsroom. It’s great that you guys all have ideas on how online journalism should work — and some of them are very good ideas — but unless you understand how a newsroom operates, it amounts to a bunch of armchair quarterbacks.
It’s a lot harder to find the open reciever when you’re standing in the pocket about to get sacked than when you’re watching the game from the roof camera angle on HDTV, let me assure you.
I’ll say it again — visually, the design above is very impressive. Functionaly, it shows a lack of understanding of how news operations work. It looks like the work of a designer who’s never been in a newsroom. And I imagine that’s exactly what it is.
In order to achieve quality design (which is, at it’s core, problem-solving), one must first understand the problem domain.
4.5.2007
15:24
Jeff,
Thanks for your kind words about the design. Very appreciated. And you are right. I am no editor. This is why I still think that I know what I am doing:
Of course it’s all very NOW-oriented, and 24/7. Particularly intriguing is the fact that “Yesterday” is today’s print edition, while “Now” is tomorrows print edition and “Tomorrow” is the print edition in a couple of days. We are perfectly aware of that. It doesn’t show in the design because it’s not a schematic of the editorial process but a information design sketch that shows how to organze news-driven websites. In a couple of hours I’ll post a couple of schematics on how this all actually works.
Don’t get me wrong: I am very interested in getting more input from professionals like you. So please tell me exactly where you see the problems.
4.5.2007
23:11
Jeff, you make an interesting point about newspapers being a 24/7 operation (and i’m DEFINITELY an armchair quarterback, being a programmer
). However, as a reader of a newspaper, online or not, I couldn’t care less how the newspaper staff work. I just want to see the news i’m interested in, and not have to deal with anything else.
I think having a daily edition would help me keep track of what I’ve already seen, and what the news is now. I’m not hitting the news site every 15 minutes, I’ll have a quick glance in the morning, maybe read a page or two at lunchtime, and then sit down and read a bit more in-depth after work. If I’m having to deal with the focus of the content changing constantly.
I guess it depends on who’s problem Oliver and iA are trying to solve, mine or yours
4.5.2007
23:19
Bah, my second paragraph makes very little sense. (Where’s the preview?!)
By “what the news is now”, I meant seeing how a theme or thread for the day develops. As for the last sentence, I wanted to say that I get frustrated when I have to deal with the content changing constantly.
4.5.2007
23:40
You definitely shouldn’t have to understand how the news operation works — that’s true.
It sounds like your problem is that you have a hard time figuring out what the latest content is, and how various bits of recent content relate to one another on many current newspaper sites. This is a great problem, indeed, and one that needs a solution.
But I don’t think organizing it by day is a very adequate solution. We post around 40 stories throughout a given day. And that doesn’t even include other bits of content like photos, podcasts, videos, online chats, etc, etc. It’s difficult to cram that much information onto a single page — should we do so, just because it’s all from today? Even if some of that news isn’t especially important?
If we post some information at 11:00pm and then post a follow up story at 12:30am, how can we group that information togehter, if it’s organized by day? The two stories are tightly related, but they’re not on the same day. What to do? What if there’s a basketball game today and we have post-game analysis about it tomorrow? Shouldn’t those two items be linked together visually? If so, how is this possible in a by-day organization?
Also, the by-day organization presumes that the newest content is always the most important. This is definitely not always the case. What if a story from yesterday is actually the lead story? What if a story from yesterday gets updated? Does it move to today? Does it appear on both days? What if we have an ongoing, investigative piece that runs for several weeks? Where does it go?
There is a need to see the latest content. But that’s not an editorial view of the news. That’s a programatic view. That’s not what news companies do. If you want your news programaticly feeded to you, use Digg. News companies make editorial decisions about what is the most important news, using principles of journlism that simply can’t be programmed. From an editorial perspective, just because something is the latest story, or from today, doesn’t mean it should be so promiently featured. Likewise, just because it’s the most viewed, most dugg, or most commented doesn’t mean it’s the most important, either.
Personally, I’d relegate “today’s news” or “latest news” to a separate page so that those who want their news this way can get it. Most people, however, want the most important news at the top of the page — not just the latest news.
4.6.2007
02:36
Great mock up it is clean, and organized in a way that is more user friendly, or rather apears easier to read, and much more inviting to read.
4.6.2007
08:09
[…] What if the Washington Post were a wiki? […]
4.6.2007
09:28
Jeff, I see what you mean. There seems to be two conflicting interface issues. On the one hand, a lot of readers want the very latest news that was posted 30 seconds ago, and on the other there are people like me who prefer following a story as it develops, and don’t care too much if the article is from a couple of days ago.
That being said, a daily (half-daily, any longish timeframe really) page that was archived and didn’t change much after being published would I think benefit the reader, and wouldn’t preclude there being other views on the news such as ‘latest content’ or articles grouped by theme.
4.6.2007
12:26
Oliver.
Do you wanna show it to the guys of WP?
It’s looks very nice, guy!
Congrats!
4.6.2007
15:39
Bodhi and Jeff,
I think we solved that problem. The semantically most difficult part was that today’s online information is tomorrow’s print, while today’s print is yesterday’s online info.
From an IA point of view the main problem is the 23.00 to 00.00. What if a big terror attack happens at 23.00? Will it be shown at 00.01? Of course.
This is a technical problem as well as a conceptual one.
Editorside: Technically it must be possible to display the same article over multiple days. No question. That problem is resolved on article level. I cannot get into that, as it’s too technical right now. Userside: It must be possible to recreate the start page at any given time. The wiki makes it possible to have a similar function to memeorandum.
Conceptually one has to understand that the online edition is an editorial tool to prepare the following print edition, but as such it is never identical at no point in time.
In practice there are multiple follow ups in case of an important event, so the problem you point out is not that virulent. But we definitely thought about it.
The goal is that editors and users have full control over the website.
There is more on how it works for access rights and processes on the following article.
4.6.2007
22:12
you guys are geniuses. I recently started using nytimes.com as my news site because its interface resembled the time-tested and well-developed interface of a newspaper. Then I started reading iA and all I gotta say is you got inside the user’s head, and I can’t wait for the new site.
4.10.2007
01:06
A great article… It doesn’t address the increasing speed of the collective mind in surfacing breaking stories the way DIGG and Reddit do - which I feel will be increasingly important (tpmmuckraker.com is an example of of a hive driven media outlet that moves much quicker than MSM). Another emerging trend I see is the proliferation of handheld devices and how the use of handhelds and RSS may supplant printed media for mobile readers (Soon - I suspect I will be happy with my RSS aggregator and my Samsung Blackjack on the subway or plane).
Thanks for one of the best articles on this subject I have seen.
5.8.2007
07:13
Fantastic work.
You cannot simply put this online and then claim “don’t steal this”… but I guess you know that. So if publishing this has any influence on web and blog design in the next few years, I am very happy!
1.17.2008
08:49
A brilliabt work. Clean, clutter-free, great visual hierarchy. I’d like to see more online newspapers like that.
The “real-newspaper” look instills me with confidence that the content-creators are professional and trustworthy and that the newspaper is worth reading; also I like the illusion of bite-sized content that I can manage (I tend to wander a lot around the internet link-jumping to endless pages of interesting information - That’s how I got to your site, BTW). I often read paper newspapers end to end. I never acomplished that with online newspapers - the information just keeps adding up, link after link, getting me fatigued with information overload, keeping me allways unsure I got the relevant news, or that their quality is actually on par with the offline news.
There are lots of nice touches here and there, usefull info placed where it’s relevant and all.
I have a problem feeling that online newspapers are much too “dynamic” for my taste, but that’s the nature of the Internet. What I basically want is a newspaper that I can read completely and then put down without the feeling of “man, I’ll never finish reading all that” - Links allways send me to endless places.
For me the perfect online newspaper is one with your design and which provides me with a bite-sized experience. Hope that helps