Talk amongst the weblogs this weekend is about USA Today’s new web site redesign (shown above). The redesign itself is nice (although Sholin thinks it’s light on form and McAdams agrees). But what’s beneath the hood is what’s got people stirring.
Ken Paulson describes the changes thusly:
While we’ve refined the design, we’ve also expanded the journalistic mission: Our ambition is to help readers quickly and easily make sense of the world around them by giving them a wider view of the news of the day and connecting them with other readers who can contribute to their understanding of events.
We’ll do that through a combination of original reporting, tracking what others are reporting, improved use of technology and by engaging you more directly in the news than ever before.
This is another innovative step in Gannett’s overall move into the 21st century, web 2.0 world. In a few weeks, Jennifer Carroll will be speaking at our workshop in Nashville. I hope we’ll find out more about these types of moves at that time.
For college journalists, it’s yet more evidence that the media world is changing rapidly, and there are new skills that will be needed. Some of those are technical skills, but many are about “mindset,” a term Rob Curley mentioned in our interview the other day. Now is the time to get into the mindset for the future of news.
Matthew Ingram notes some of the concerns about the new venture, but concludes:
I think getting more social with readers is something newspapers have to do, if they want to have a chance of avoiding the inevitable decline that legendary investor and gazillionaire Warren Buffett referred to in his recent remarks. But do readers want to socialize with their newspaper, or with the journalists who work there?
I think some do. Some may just wish to consume the news and be on their way, and that’s fine. Some folks don’t want to be social. But some may want to take advantage of networking tools, and to socialize in some way with the other readers of a newspaper, and I think theoretically a media outlet could become a social destination in some way. Whether USA Today can make that happen remains to be seen.
I think USAToday is going to have a tough time of it, unless they expend some energy in building those social networks out. But the same sorts of efforts show a much greater potential in smaller markets around the country. And it could definitely pay off in a college setting. The key is to stop thinking of your operation as a newspaper and start thinking of it as a media operation. At least USA Today is showing a desire to do that.
More coverage and discussion from Michael Arrington and Steve Rubel.
on Mar 5th, 2007 at 12:57 am
Agree they will have a very tough time. Not only is it a paradigm change from newspaper to media operation as you state, but their content is not a good fit. Their content is anti-community: wide breadth, shallow depth. Communities focus around narrow breadth, deep depth. Glad they added the features, but features don’t create communities.