News on the Web

Most newspapers publish electronic editions. I could say there are X number of online news operations today, but that would be wrong. Things are changing too quickly for me to keep track of who is doing what. Fortunately, there are people who do follow these things.

The Newslink list is a very good place to look.

Web papers are not alike. There is a great deal of experimentation, and the results, as you might suspect, indicate that not all experiments are successes. Some news organizations, for example, include just about everything that appears in the day's print product. Others include only selected items from the daily paper. Some include material that never appeared in the paper. And some have archives of previous papers.

Some began by charging you for the privilege of looking at their electronic versions. The Nando Times, which began as the electronic arm of the Raleigh News and Observer and is now the new media arm of McClatchey Newspapers, started out by making some information available for free and charging for the rest. Now it's all free, which is the approach most newspaper and magazine web sites seem to be pursuing. About the only paper that can get away with charging for its content these days is the Wall Street Journal, which offers a taste for free but the rest for a subscription fee. Some papers had electronic editions that were not originally available on the web, but most, if not all, of these have migrated to web versions. The San Jose Mercury News is an example. When it began online publication, the Mercury Center only was available through America Online. Now, the Merc is web-based and is one of the old guard of new media.

Approaches to design

If you explore a number of online newspapers, you'll see that they take different approaches to information design and presentation, though some commonalities sem to be emerging. Some electronic newspapers offer lists of stories indexed by headlines or headlines and summaries. This is the way many organizations begin exploring electronic publication. The elaborately designed electronic news"papers" with sections, section fronts, searchable classified ads and elaborate indexing through hyperlinking.

Many look a lot like indexes, with summaries of articles that link to the full stories "inside." Others used HTML tables coding to attempt to recreate the look and feel of a traditional newspaper page. The Detroit News tried that approach but redesigned a while ago to a more typical index treatment. The New York Times has tried to retain the concept of section fronts, using headlines rather than heads and summaries in a grid-based layout. Screen size effectively limits the amount of text you can display on newspaper-style pages, So a newspaper style page is, at best, a page of news summaries designed to indicate importance by size and placement. Many news site front pages have evolved into "portal-like" displays, with many links into the site. CNN.com is one. Incidentally, this page has primarily been about online newspapers, but there are many other news web sites, from special-purpose news sites, such as C/Net to global search-engine sites such as Excite.com.

A few questions

As you explore online papers, think about the choices the web-page authors have made in designing and presenting information.

If If you think of additional questions, E-Mail them to me.

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