Nieman Journalism Lab

The future of the feature: Breaking out of templates to build customized reading experiences

Posted: 16 Nov 2012 09:03 AM PST

When it comes to reading long form, the web can be an ugly, distracting place. It’s the reason why services like Instapaper and Pocket (née Read It Later) exist: to strip content of its context — noisy site designs, advertisements, and other unnecessary elements. But perhaps we’re moving into a new era where more of the web is clean and readable. Maybe the future of web publications will be beautiful enough that the reading experience is more enjoyable in its natural habitat.

This is how I felt, at least, when I came across ESPN.com’s “The Long Strange Trip of Dock Ellis,” a gorgeously designed feature about the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher who threw a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. It’s arguably one of baseball’s most colorful tales; this take on it is certainly one of the most ambitious web designs ever attempted by a traditional media company for a single article. The piece is generously adorned with accompanying visuals — photos of Ellis, memorabilia like trading cards, pull quotes, all moving and sliding while the reader scrolls. The reading experience is very comfortable on both desktop and tablet, thanks to a larger text size and generous amounts of white space. It’s feels like an experience instead of a block of words surrounded by the detritus of the web.

But at a time when news is increasingly consumed without context — stripped down in tablet readers or on mobile devices — and when templates have taken over news web design, what’s the point of dedicating design resources to online feature layouts? Why are outlets like ESPN, Pitchfork, and The Verge investing in bespoke design for articles?

From Super Mario Bros. to ESPN.com

For John Korpics, vice president of creative at ESPN Digital and Print Media, much of the goal is to replicate the immersive experience of reading a magazine — to stand out from the sea of low-end clickbait that fills up so much of the web. “The same way you might read a magazine article, you can browse the surface layer of visuals like graphics, captions, and pull quotes, or you can dive deeper. The key is that the user has the choice of how to interact with the story,” said Korpics.

But while “The Long Strange Trip of Dock Ellis” takes a lot of design hints from magazine layouts, the most interesting and attractive visual elements are unique to the web. Most remarkable is the use of parallax scrolling, a method in which the background moves more slowly than the foreground to give the illusion of depth. (Think of the way the background looks in Super Mario Bros.) Design elements like this exist separate from anything that could ever be done with a traditional magazine layout.

Jena Janovy, deputy editor at ESPN.com, said that several other stories had already chosen for similar deluxe design treatment for later this year and early next year. The design execution alone for “Dock Ellis,” from inception to conception, took three weeks. Which begs the question: How scalable is this? And will smaller publications, without the resources of a site the size of ESPN.com, be able to create something as beautiful?

Building a better template

Tech site The Verge was only about a month old when influential bloggers like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber started declaring it was “one of the best publications in the world.” Founded by Joshua Topolsky, who had previously led Engadget, The Verge represented a chance to build something new and ambitious from the ground up.

“When I left Engadget, there was an emphasis on ‘cheap, fast, and dirty.’ The truth, in what we found, is that people are psyched about longer stuff that’s in-depth and beautiful,” Topolsky said.

There’s nothing cheap, fast, or dirty about The Verge’s impressively designed feature content, which the site has been regularly publishing since its launch a year ago. Take, for example, the versatile design of this long-form piece on biohackers, which elegantly balances text, photos, and video in its storytelling.

The Verge’s secret weapon is Chorus, its custom content management system that makes it easy for writers and editors to create intricate feature layouts. Vox Media — which owns The Verge, as well as GIF-savvy sports site SB Nation and new gaming site Polygon — is protective of Chorus’s features, but a piece about the CMS by TechCrunch describes it as an extremely robust, flexible publishing platform with a strong emphasis on both editorial workflow and design.

As a testament to its power, The Verge only hired its first full-time designer last May. Up until that point, all feature layouts, such as this visual history of Android and this personal essay about Starcraft, had been designed by the editorial staff. The Verge’s features don’t quite have the single-use designs that stories “Dock Ellis” do; they share a common visual frame and differentiate from one another mostly through creative typographic highlights and small graphical touches. But they are definitely designed for reading, not content consumption, and it doesn’t take anywhere close to three weeks to build a story out.

When I asked if each publication should have its own custom platform, Topolsky quickly agrees — explaining that, though his title at The Verge is editor-in-chief, he guides much of the feature development and provides a lot of design input for Chorus.

“I think everyone is going to do this. We’re fighting the same battle [as other publications]: trying to figure out how to create a scalable tool for writers and designers that lets you create beautiful things for the native web.”

In fact, Topolsky’s motivations behind The Verge’s design is deeply rooted in an optimism in the native web, as opposed to designing platform-specific apps to enhance the reading experience. (Though, to be fair, The Verge has an iOS and Android app.) All the site’s feature pieces render appropriately on mobile devices and tablets, and fully adaptive designs will appear on the site early next year. (SB Nation and Polygon are already adaptive.) In contrast, that gorgeous "Dock Ellis" spread is difficult to read on an iPhone without zooming.

According to Topolsky, “Building it once and making it work in multiple place is where everyone is headed with publishing.”

Pitchfork goes horizontal

Venerable indie music site Pitchfork has been publishing album reviews since 1995, and over the past decade and a half, has gradually expanded its content to news, columns, and long-form profiles. This July, the site began publishing Cover Story features, profiles of big artists with specially designed “dynamic” layouts.

They fall somewhere between The Verge’s templated-but-designed and ESPN’s highly-customized approaches. Though most of the profiles so far appear to use a similar template and design language, the tone and aesthetic of each piece is drastically different. Compared to the vertically scrolling designs from ESPN.com and The Verge, I found Pitchfork’s columned, horizontal layout a bit more difficult to read. But visually, it’s much more interesting. Pitchfork takes advantage of the dynamic features of the web. This profile of Cat Power has subtly shifting colors; the Ariel Pink piece animates pull quotes as the reader scrolls; and appropriate for a music site, there’s an embedded music player that persists throughout the layout, featuring a selection of playable tracks from the profile subject. These things improve the Cover Story features not just in terms of readability but tonality, existing to supplement content but never distracting from it. (The fourth Cover Story, on Bat for Lashes, shares the vertical, parallax approach of “Dock Ellis.”)

“I’m less excited about the bells and whistles,” said Michael Renaud, a creative director at Pitchfork. “This level of control just provides the opportunity to present content in a more traditional layout environment that gives focus to the story itself.”

The Cover Story pieces are well-written profiles, but also come from a tradition of great long-form music writing published by Pitchfork. It’s only recently that browsers are catching up to support the kind of visual design that can match the quality of written content.

“Web design has long been plagued with limitations on things like typefaces and bandwidth,” said Renaud. “And now that things seem to be loosening up in those areas, I hope designers can come back to the basics that we once had to abandon, rather than over-designing some grandiose experience for every piece of content. It’s certainly an exciting moment.”

Going mobile

Like “Dock Ellis,” Pitchfork’s Cover Story features are hard to read on a mobile phone. Martin Belam, the UX consultant formerly of The Guardian, criticized the Bat for Lashes piece for it, quoting his friend Mary Hamilton: “Lauding web design that doesn’t work at all on mobile as brilliant is like praising a static PDF of a gorgeously designed print page posted to the web.”

While there’s still work to be done on responsive design — the more complex a design, the harder it is to make it look beautiful on varied screen sizes — readers seem to be reacting positively to these designed pieces. “Dock Ellis” has been one of the most popular long-form presentations from ESPN.com in the past five years; Pitchfork saw a big boost, especially from referrals from social networks (“the design does give people another excuse to tweet about it or whatever,” said Renaud); and for each of its design-heavy pieces, The Verge consistently sees a traffic uptick.

While researching this piece, I asked friends and colleagues about other unique feature designs they’d come across, but in the process, I had a hard time coming up with a single term to describe the trend (I often defaulted to the not-so-elegant phrase “design-y feature pieces”). Even within publications, there doesn’t seem to be a consistent nomenclature for it. Pitchfork makes a distinction between “dynamic” and “standard” viewing experiences; at The Verge, Topolsky says they simply call them “feature layouts.”

But perhaps we don’t need a word for it. There’s a clear trend that both major media outlets and independent web publications are investing the resources and energy into more thoughtful and uniquely designed article layouts, and expect more sites to follow suit. We might not need a word for these kinds of designs, because soon this might be the way all serious publications treat their features.

This Week in Review: The BBC’s scandals blow up, and WaPo’s changing of the guard

Posted: 16 Nov 2012 07:00 AM PST

BBC’s problems continue to compound: The sexual abuse problems at the BBC boiled over this week, as a parallel scandal emerged: In the midst of criticism for killing a story about sexual abuse by one of its former hosts, the BBC ran a report that falsely accused a former British politician as a sexual abuser himself. At the Columbia Journalism Review, former Guardian digital editor Emily Bell has the best explanation for American audiences of what’s going on and what it means for the BBC.

As the Guardian explained, the BBC didn’t name the politician by name, though it provided some clues in its report. The name quickly spread on Twitter, and the politician has vowed to sue those who identified him there. (He reached a £185,000 settlement with the BBC.) Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon has a good summary of the fallout, which was swift and severe: The BBC’s top executive, director general George Entwistle, resigned after initially saying he was totally unaware of the report, and the BBC’s news director and her deputy both “stepped aside.”

The director of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the nonprofit group that assisted the BBC with the sexual abuse story, also resigned. The Newsnight program that broadcast the report (and killed the earlier sexual abuse story about the BBC’s own) is now being investigated both externally, by the British government’s communication regulator, and internally, with the chairman of the BBC Trust saying the network needs “a thorough structural radical overhaul.” The BBC plans to fill its top executive position with an outsider, though it won’t go through the full search process.

A Times article examined how the BBC’s extensive guidelines failed in these cases. At The Observer, former BBCer John Ware defended the broadcaster as “overwhelmingly a force for good and understanding” and called the Newsnight scandals an aberration, while Patrick Smith of The Media Briefing said the BBC is marked by continual paranoia about where it stands in the public eye. The Guardian’s David Leigh, meanwhile, pleaded for investigative journalism not to be thrown out in the outrage over Newsnight’s failures.

All this happened while the BBC’s former director general, Mark Thompson, started work as the CEO of The New York Times Co., where he’s expected to keep a low profile for a while. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi put together a good explanation of the Times’ response to Thompson’s arrival, and media analyst Ken Doctor examined the danger for the Times in appearing to be connected to the scandal through Thompson’s apparent incompetence in handling it. The Times, meanwhile, broke news of a letter sent by Thompson’s lawyers about the Savile scandal that contradicted his claim that he didn’t know about it until after he left the BBC.

Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici said Thompson appears to be safe for now, partly because the Times simply doesn’t have any viable alternatives at this point. But Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote an ominous column on Thompson’s arrival, concluding, “The world is smaller now. What happens in London reverberates in New York. And the chaos at the BBC … feels uncomfortably close to home.” Doctor also saw the potential for the Times to be swept up in this and urged Thompson to step aside.

A change at the top for the Post: The Washington Post pulled the trigger on a big editorial shakeup this week when its top editor, Marcus Brauchli, resigned, to be replaced by Boston Globe editor Martin Baron. Brauchli’s departure had been rumored for several months, and The New York Times detailed the ongoing conflict between him and Post publisher Katharine Weymouth, which often revolved around newsroom cuts (Weymouth wanted more; Brauchli didn’t). Weymouth insisted to Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon and others that Brauchli’s leaving was his decision, not hers.

Several observers offered assessments of Brauchli’s tenure as Post editor, which began in 2008. Reuters’ Jack Shafer said that even if it wasn’t his fault, “It's the Post’s transition from fat to slim that will be Brauchli's legacy, not the journalistic accomplishments during his watch.” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum offered a similar assessment, prescribing an online paywall as the solution for the Post’s financial woes.

The Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, identified five lessons from the Brauchli era, including the somewhat deflating reality that unlike The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, “by virtue of its business model, the Post is a regional newspaper, with all the grim implications for newsroom resources.” (Late last week, Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton also chastised the paper for its lack of local coverage.)

As for the incoming editor, Baron, Poynter’s Beaujon noted that most of the stories on his arrival have focused on the prospects of cuts at the Post, though Baron told Politico he has no roadmap yet for the paper. Pieces on Baron at the Post and the Boston Phoenix painted similar pictures of a steely, demanding editor with a reputation of coaxing excellence out of journalists amid deep cuts. Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Boston’s Northeastern University, called Baron “an inspired choice.”

Petraeus, sex scandals, and privacy: The political story that’s taken over the U.S. news media has been the sexual indiscretions of former CIA chief David Petraeus and the bizarre investigation that has swept up several others, including the U.S.’ top officer in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen. For a quick primer on the story, Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon has a thorough list who’s been named as saying or doing what to whom.

The episode has prompted some scrutiny from several corners over the way the media handles sensational scandals like this. News designer Mario Garcia noted that the story has almost all of the traditional attributes of newsworthiness, making the media swarm pretty predictable. Screenwriter and former reporter David Simon derided the futility and hypocrisy of journalists’ preoccupation with others’ sex lives, concluding that “when Americans begin to accept the human condition for what it is rather than an opportunity to jeer at the other fellow for getting caught, then we will be, if nothing else, a little bit more grown up.” Reuters’ Jack Shafer, on the other hand, argued for the importance of sex scandal coverage as an entree for the public to more important issues.

New York magazine’s Joe Coscarelli laid out the media’s five stages of grief over the fall of a man they considered an American archetype, and Roy Peter Clark of Poynter identified some of the media distortions that make those downfalls seem bigger than they are.

The other media/tech angle to this story is that of digital privacy, as many of the pieces of evidence in this case are from Gmail messages found by federal investigators. Wired’s Kim Zetter explained how Petraeus’ illicit emails were found, and Adam Serwer of Mother Jones dug through the troubling legal privacy issues with our own ostensibly secret emails. The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe and The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald both expressed alarm at the reach of U.S. government’s surveillance efforts, with Greenwald stating, “what is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations.”

Israel, Hamas, and war on social media: Conflict between Israel and Hamas flared up this week, and social media played a role we’ve never seen before in war. As BuzzFeed’s Matt Buchanan documented, the Israeli Defense Forces’ Twitter account live-tweeted its attacks on Hamas leaders and defended its actions, producing the first viral government war propaganda we’ve seen. The IDF also posted video of its attack that killed Hamas leaders on YouTube — which was blocked and then reinstated — and received a threat on Twitter from a wing of Hamas in return for its own threats. They also used some gamification elements on their blog, which repulsed ReadWrite’s Jon Mitchell.

Wired’s Noah Schachtman explained why Israel might be publicizing its attacks this way, quoting a Harvard scholar who saw its video as both a warning to its enemies and a reassurance to its own people and to those concerned about potential collateral damage. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram wrote that the improved social media tools of governments and armies will make it that much more difficult for war reporters to inform the public about what’s really going on in battle.

BetaBeat’s Jessica Roy reported on how social media companies are handling the situation, and both BuzzFeed’s Buchanan and The Atlantic’s Brian Fung looked at the question of whether Israel is violating Twitter or YouTube’s terms of services. (In both cases, they really don’t know what to do.) Ingram also noted the inscrutability of those social media gatekeepers.

Reading roundup: A few other news stories going on this week, too. Here’s a quick review of the rest:

— A final wave of post-election commentary on Nate Silver and political punditry: Gallup shot back at Silver after he called out their inaccuracy; Silver gave an interview to Chicago magazine and chatted with Deadspin readers, explaining, among other things, why he doesn’t vote. The Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano proposed a way to incorporate stats into punditry, and Bora Zivkovic of Scientific American mused on Silver and the nature of expertise in journalism.

— A few more takes from the debate on newspapers and Google News: The Economist argued that going after Google isn’t going to solve newspapers’ problems, and PandoDaily’s Hamish McKenzie wondered if newspapers are becoming more bold because Google News is becoming less important. A chart went around showing Google’s dominance over newspapers in ad revenue, though Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review argued that it was misleading.

— The Financial Times backed down on having its paywall cover its blogs, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon explained why.

— Two good reads for the weekend: An enlightening Lab interview with Tumblr executive editor Jessica Bennett, and a strong argument by Free Press’ Josh Stearns for the necessity of digital literacy in a “big data” era.

George Entwistle photo courtesy BBC. Marty Baron photo courtesy The Boston Globe. David Petraeus photo by Hector Alejandro used under a Creative Commons license.

YULI AKHMADA

Sabtu, 17 November 2012