“I was there when …”
Just a little late-night philosophizing.
Twenty or thirty years from now, what will we tell our children, grandchildren or students about journalism in the first few decades of the 21st century?
Will we look back with a wistful sigh and tell them we were there when journalism died?
Nah.
Will we remember these years as a golden age?
Nope, not that either. That phrase implies something that’s developed, mature, thriving, flourishing — like the Age of Pericles or the Pax Romana, a time when things were going great, but not a whole lot was changing. No, definitely not that.
But we’ll remember this period as an exciting one. Scary? Absolutely. Terrifying, even. The grit-your-teeth, reach-for-the-Rolaids years. But exciting. We’ll remember it as a time when everything we knew was starting to crumble, and so we tried everything. When we tried a whole lot of things that failed — but most importantly, when we tried a lot of things. When we didn’t know exactly what to do next, so we experimented like crazy, coming up with one plan after another … sometimes throwing them by the wayside, sometimes trying them only to watch them crash and burn, and sometimes making them succeed.
Again: We’ll remember that we tried a lot, and we failed a lot, but most importantly, we tried.
We tried, and we learned.
Is anything more exciting than that?
What if we ran a news site on PhpBB?
News sites seem to fall into two main modes of organization. The most prevalent is the one you see at CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com, and my own employer. Conceptually, this layout more or less mirrors the front page of a print newspaper. OK, chances are everything on the front page is relatively recent, but it’s also the result of a conscious effort by editors to rank the news in order of importance. (The homepage of lenconnect.com, for instance, does display in reverse chronological order by default, but it only displays the stories for which we’ve checked the “homepage” box in our content management system, and we have the option of manually ranking stories as well.)
Then there’s the blog model, which can be seen on sites like AnnArbor.com and The Batavian. Stories run in reverse chronological order by default. Whenever you visit the site, you don’t see what its editors have decided you should see first — you automatically see whatever’s newest. (Although, again, this isn’t absolute — some things show up on the main page and some don’t.) For more, see Scott Karp, who’s a fan of the model, and the author of OnlineNewsDesign.com, who’s not so crazy about it.
I’m pretty much agnostic on this front; I figure both models have their ups and downs, and different consumers will have their own reasons for preferring one over the other. Which is why it’s probably a good idea, as plenty of sites do, to offer the news both ways — for example, for a conventional hierarchical having a “most recent posts” block in your sidebar for those who really want to know what’s new since the last time they checked.
But those aren’t the only ways of organizing content — so, back to the title of this post: What if we ran a news site on phpBB?
It wouldn’t have to be phpBB. It could be vBulletin, it could be UBB.Threads … whatever. Any software originally designed for discussion forums. Bulletin board sites can be broken down by category, but within the category — with the exception of pinned or stickied threads — the thread you see on top is the thread that’s been added to most recently. The thread at the top of the list might not be the newest thread, and it might not be the one with the most comments, but in general, the more interest a thread generates, the more time it will spend near the top of the list.
One big plus to this kind of format: If you want a platform that really emphasizes the importance of comments and reader participation, this would do it. First on a psychological front, since it’s a system that was built from the beginning for the purpose of creating discussion communities, and second because of what it emphasizes — not what we think is most important or what we added most recently, but rather what the community has been discussing the most.
I can also think of plenty of problems with using this presentation for news. For one, unlike a “Most Popular Items” list, it’s pretty easy for one person to game — if you’re a partisan who wants to keep an unflattering story about an opponent in the spotlight, all you have to do is go back every eight hours and bump the thread.
Honestly, I think this probably isn’t the best format for a news site. Certainly not as a default. But some systems already allow people to view a site either in a conventional newspaper.com layout or in a blog-style “river of news” layout … what if a site allowed users to choose a format mimicking a discussion forum as well?
If nothing else, it’s interesting to think about.
First impressions of AnnArbor.com, Part 2 (Web edition)
Two key ways AnnArbor.com differs from most newspaper Web sites:
1. Presentation of news. While most news sites to some extent copy the basic concept of the front page of a newspaper — the editors choose the most important or interesting stories to showcase and put them front and center — AnnArbor.com more closely resembles a blog, with news presented as more of a reverse-chronological stream.
As Ben Cohen at the Nieman Lab notes, “[t]he main limitation of such a format are obvious: namely, that a big story can be washed away by a torrent of small ones.” But Cohen also reports that chief content officer Tony Dearing says a solution is in the works — down the road, it’ll be possible to treat a given story differently if it deserves extra attention.
2. Advertising format. Instead of a more conventional banner approach, ads appear alongside editorial content, and they behave like blog entries — you see a headline, and you can click on it to go to a new page with more details. The ads are separated from independent editorial content by being given a different background color and a little red flag off to the right that says “Deal.”
One thing I’m curious about: Is the “Deal” branding going to appeal to every advertiser, or will it eventually turn out there’s a demand for a different way of labeling things? I can picture a high-end luxury retailer saying “You know, this ‘deal’ thing doesn’t really make sense for my marketing plan … my stuff is expensive and there’s a reason for it, and that’s what I want people to think of when they see my name.” Of course, that’s probably not a big problem to change if the need arises.
Three things I especially like about the site:
1. It’s easy to crunch the news however you like it. The first couple of times I scrolled through the main page, I thought “You know, there’s not a whole lot on this page that I want to read.” Then I clicked on the “news” tab, and suddenly there were a whole lot of stories I wanted to read. (It’s not just the standard news/sports/entertainment divisions … see next sentence.) If you experiment for a couple of days — “What does it look like if I click on News / Featured Posts? How about News / Most Popular? News / Everything?” — you’re likely to find the mode of presentation that most often gives you things you’re interested in. You can also view by neighborhood (although I’m not in a good position to test that feature in any meaningful way, living 45 minutes away from Ann Arbor and not being too familiar with the neighborhoods).
2. Commenting feels like an organic part of the site, not an afterthought. On the individual story page, there’s a large “Your Voice” header at the bottom of the copy with comments below. On the index page, each story lists the number of comments currently posted on it. A “Your Voice” section is featured prominently on the main page with an excerpt. One additional thing I’d like to see is a “Recent Comments” block in a sidebar — on other sites, I find that a list of recent comments is a good tool for discovering stories I otherwise would have missed, or stories that I read a few days ago and didn’t realize had sparked an interesting discussion.
3. They’re not reluctant to link out. For example, this link to a CBS News report on a camp at U-M for kids with disabilities.