Printed Matters

I just want to draw some attention to what I think are some cool ideas being bandied about on news website design by some Dutch developers. I learned of it today via my feed from Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. Take a look at www.en.nl. It’s in Dutch, but I was able to figure out what was going on with the help of Babelfish.

The first thing I noticed about the site was that there are no menus. The space normally reserved for a menu of categories – news, sports, entertainment, etc. – is instead dedicated to a list of stories. By default, when you arrive at the site, the list consists of all the stories that were posted on the site in the last hour. But you can see what happened in previous hours by mousing over the bar graph at the top of the page, which interaction designer Wilbert Baan calls a newsriver.

The front page has exactly one story on it – the last one. There is no package of news like on a traditional news site, where they give you the five top headlines, some sports, some entertainment, and 300 or so links to articles and features inside the site (which I whined about recently in my reviews of local Toronto newspaper sites). None of that. Just one story, the newsriver, a textbox where you can tag the story, a search box, a place where you can rate the story, a place where you can comment on the story, some social bookmarking tools, and some lists of the most popular stories by importance, comments, and views.

Missing entirely are old-school concepts of packaging. Gone are the news, sports, and entertainment sections. There’s just the flow of news and some (for lack of a better term) Web 2.0 ways of interacting with the news.

This strikes me as an embrace of the unbundling that Nick Carr was talking about on Britannica Blog. They’re not sorting the news into any kind of pre-ordained canisters that reflect the way newspapers break things into sections.

Instead, you tag stories yourself. You don’t even have to be logged in on the site to add tags to stories. I tagged a story about swimming as “swimming” (in English). Once the story is tagged, you can click the resulting link to find other stories that other people have tagged the same way.

Unfortunately, the search function was broken when I visited just now. But I’m sure it would search among the user-defined tags as well as the article texts to generate results.

Also interesting is that they let you see different versions of the same story. By default you see the latest version, but you can see the original version too as it came in (presumably from a wire feed or some such).

This represents a new way to think about news. No pre-packaging. Several different ways for readers to get involved (by ranking, commenting, tagging, sharing, and even, if I understand it correctly, changing the actual articles in Wiki fashion). Emphasis on the flow of news rather than on the editorial judgment of site operators. Emphasis on the stories themselves, and their metadata, instead of on branding and sections and categories.

I agree with Paul Bradshaw at Poynter: this is one to watch.

I just have two complaints, one minor, one more important.

The minor thing is that I don’t like the placement of the search box. I can’t see it down there under the tagging text box. If I were a regular user, I know I’d eventually tag an article with something I meant to search for. They should put it somewhere top right, where people are used to looking for it.

The other complaint is that I can’t easily see how to go back into archives. I can see what stories were posted in the last 24 hours….what about before that? Or am I still thinking old-school?

Update: I see in this comment by Wilbert Baan that the original articles are in fact coming in on a feed – the ANP, a Dutch press agency. I wondered what all those ANP logos were about