The importance of a breaking news design
Cory Bergman October 23rd, 2007
I’ve been watching how the newspaper and TV sites cover the fires in Southern California, and it’s become very clear that some TV sites are having difficulty showcasing their content. For example, look at 10News.com and KNBC.com, to name a couple. Their standard templates, in my humble opinion, are restricting their coverage on the home page and don’t do much to distinguish this massive story from any other breaking news story. Everything feels like it’s jammed into small, inflexible boxes. In the 10News.com example, a big ad animated across the top of the page, pushing content down and back up again. Story angles get lost in the rotating tabs. Then look at LATimes.com. Clean, straighforward with an expanded coverage area that pops. Yes, I’m comparing apples to oranges in some respects because the LATimes is able to produce much more online content with a much larger staff — but critical information is easier to locate and it feels like a major story:
In another example, MSNBC.com has just switched to its breaking news layout, allowing more content to surface:
Even the SeattlePI.com moved to a big story layout:
If you build a breaking news layout ahead of time, it’s not that much work to execute it when the story breaks. Just flick the switch. TV sites should own breaking news, and a flexible, content-driven design plays a big part.
11 Comments Add your own
1. Brink | October 23rd, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Corporate CMS’s don’t always make it possible to do what you suggest.
2. Gorman | October 23rd, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Agreed. However, it doesn’t take much to go into a service like WorldNow, create a block with an iframe, and layout that area the way you want. There are more than a few stations that already do that with day-to-day coverage. Ideal? No. But you work with what you got.
3. Anonymous | October 23rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
I think CNN’s site is best at conveying urgency.
The fact that the logo is green, even though it’s for Planet in Peril, also makes my brain think, something really different is going on, I must pay attention to what is on my screen.
Which brings up the question, how unlucky is CNN to have their giant, super-publicized ratings event take place at a time when their competitors will have live video of 500 miles of fires and half a million evacuees?
4. Tom Planchet | October 23rd, 2007 at 2:55 pm
I agree and we try to do that with our small staff here in New Orleans, but it is difficult for a web staff in small markets.
Places like San Diego probably have staffs designed to meet minimal day to day coverage needs, much less the catastrophic story, and when a huge story kicks in, it’s hard to count on help from the news folks because they are slammed doing their jobs.
Besides, if you just get a ‘body’ it’s hard to train them instantaneously and often the ‘help’ costs you more time than no help.
Web sites need to be included in catastrophic planning, for Katrina, we were pushed to the head of our list, especially since the majority of our viewers were out of TV range and depended on our live streams to get their local coverage. The problem is, the web is designed for THIS type of story (provided the spigot is large enough and doesn’t crash), but TV resources are hard to translate to the web on a moment’s notice.
It’s a signal that web staffs and the web’s importance needs to be put more into catastrophic planning and that more of the TV staff needs basic web publishing skills so they can help in time of crisis.
WIth so many people out of their homes, I assume the web is IT again for this story.
5. peter arthurson | October 23rd, 2007 at 5:13 pm
worldnow AND IB(S) allow you to easily build “breaking news templates” and throw the switch on them YOURSELF very easily…
they are “corporate” CMS’ and, yes, actually do this.
the results are astounding when people plan in advance.
actually, I’ve never encountered an “evil corporate CMS” that doesnt allow this…
6. Jacqueline Kazil | October 23rd, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Brink wrote - “Corporate CMS’s don’t always make it possible to do what you suggest.”
I think the best we can do as journalists is to learn from this situation and think about how we can build on in the future. If the CMS interface doesn’t allow manipulating the layout, take matters further than a Band-Aid. I would think that if one took the initiative to code a mock-up the page by combining boxes for a breaking news situation and went to corporate with his/her suggestions, it would be in corporate’s best interest to listen. You have a stronger argument if websites owned by the same company are using the same design, because then you have solved their “what if” situation also. If corporate shuns the idea and doesn’t have a good reason, doesn’t have anything in the works and doesn’t plan on taking any action,… why would you want to work for such a company that would make you want to pull out your hair day after day?
……
Berman wrote - “Story angles get lost in the rotating tabs. Then look at LATimes.com.”
LATimes.com is based off of the same design as Chicagotribune.com & Sun-Sentinel.com (optional rotating boxes), Newsday.com (automatic rotating boxes)…. the list goes on. These are just different examples of how the same design was reused.
……
Bergman wrote - “Everything feels like it’s jammed into small, inflexible boxes. Then look at LATimes.com. Clean, straighforward with an expanded coverage area that pops.”
The problem with most news sites is that there is no central visual image. If there is a quasi-central visual image there is an ad that distracts from it that is 2x to 3x the size of it. What would happen if you put 10 small or medium sized images on the front page of a print newspaper? It would never make it to the printing press.
What if we took the same approach to layout as Google’s customizable homepage or facebook profiles but took it a step further. Just because the layout changes doesn’t mean the branding does. What if instead of placing content on the web we designed homepages with ease and flexibility for rearranging content. Each day or designated time or maybe when a big news event occurs, a designer would interact with a CMS that allows them to select a two column or three column layout, then allows them to break up those columns further.
7. joe | October 24th, 2007 at 4:35 am
“actually, I’ve never encountered an “evil corporate CMS” that doesnt allow this… ”
Try working for a Tribune TV station and you will.
8. Charles | October 24th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Thanks to your suggestion, I’m actually spending time coming up with a template for breaking news for the front page of the student newspaper I work on. I can’t imagine anything really happening that would ever require using such the page, but, that’s what plans are for, right?
9. Michael Gay | October 24th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
10news.com has really improved their presentation since your post Cory. There is no longer a rotating top story, and there is plenty of additional content now offered. I especially like their behind the scenes blog - great photos! It’s sometimes easy for us to critique from outside the market, but for those at the station who worked over 36 hours straight without going off the air, my congratulations for delivering news during this stressful time.
10. matt j | October 25th, 2007 at 6:56 am
Actually, I believe in CNN’s latest redesign that they introduced several layers of escalation to their design in order to support a breaking story which grows in importance over time. Something to learn from.
Perhaps TV broadcaster sites may just be new to the game. Most news sites that were active in 2000 learned something from 9/11. You need to be able to execute a takeover.
In the future it will be interesting to see if news sites trigger breaking news takeovers region by region. For example, the fires were a much bigger deal for San Diego before they would have justified a nationwide takeover of the CNN web site.
Finally, I would suggest that Cory represent his screens more accurately when scaling them down and adding them to his entry’s inline. I thought MSNBC had done something groundbreaking with the massive image for the lead until I realized that they are still utilizing an 8×6 page design — while the other two are 10×7. Scaling them down to appear to be using the same page resolution is actually a bit misleading.
Go Sox!
11. camulator | October 26th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Brink,
There’s always a workaround.
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