Interactions - July/August 2009

designing and building new forms of content provision. The aim is to make the entire newspaper “programmable.” Programmers will be able to mashup the paper’s structured content—reviews, event listings, recipes, and so on. This is a great opportunity for those immersed in information and experience design.

I love the materiality of a good broadsheet newspaper and the magazines that I read. It annoys me just a little that, thanks to my beloved Kindle, I don’t have newspapers lying around the house to stuff my rain-sodden shoes (yes, it rains in California, too!). But I am also looking forward to a world with better designed digital news formats. What we need is some technical savvy, a design sensibility, and a deeper human-centered understanding of the gestalt of news consumption between and across representational forms. We need something more than the current state of the art, which offers us only the most superficial and easy-to-implement of technical convergences. We need more than the horseless carriage of digital news.

July + August 2009

interactions

for slow-burn stories to linger, while fast-burn stories are updated with new content?

4. Device design. My phone screen is just too small for me to really luxuriate in a good story, and layouts are not designed for effective skimming. Yesterday I cursed out loud as I gave up on a page that was taking way too long to load—although the story was tantalizingly titled it was beyond my reach, thanks to a combination of a slow network and a lot of pretty but slow-to-download content. I am curious what comes after the Kindle? Is electronic paper or Xerox’s promised reprintable paper going to be a reality? I want the large-gesture, embodied experience of the broadsheet and decent screen real estate for laying out content.

I am not alone in wanting some good design heads on these problems. We should better understand the variations that exist in how people read, share, tell, and retell news. In addressing people’s everyday news-consumption practices, a 2008 Associated Press ethnographic study cited email and Internet-based sources as a mainstay in many young people’s news experience. However, these interviewees, like many in a study I am currently running in the Bay Area, all talk about the “work” of reading the news online and say that “news fatigue” is increasing. What this seems to boil down to is that there are plenty of places to find news on the Internet. But in this bacchanalian information glut, the shallow story dominates; it is often difficult to find the follow-up to a news item; and there is a lot

of repetition. To the last point, the Project for Excellence in Journalism observed in its 2006 “State of the News Media” report that though 14,000 unique stories were found on a news-aggregating site in one 24-hour period, there were in fact only a handful of discrete news events. There is vastly more content available, of course, and things have improved somewhat since 2006, but that other content is, relatively speaking, hard to find.

In design terms, online news is mimicking the advancement of the automobile, and we are in the equivalent of the late 1800s and early 1900s—in shape and form reproducing the horse-drawn carriage, not yet having found an aesthetic reflective of the new technology’s infrastructure and capability. I laughed out loud when the U.K.’s Guardian announced on April 1, 2009, that it was going to abandon its print publication in favor of Twitter-based, 140-character stories. Whoever came up with that joke understood the issue at hand—and prompted me to think about media fads and how we need to move across the available channels and representational forms, and match the media and the story for best effect. Many forms of a story— summary, snippet, and in-depth coverage—are needed to really engage and inform a populace. It’s not just about dissemination; it’s about information, communication, and channel design.

Newspaper companies are on board with enlisting others to aid in the design of the next generation of news forms. In early 2009, the New York Times Developer Network hosted its first API seminar to start

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elizabeth Churchill is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research leading research in social media. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has studied and designed technologies for effective social connection. At Yahoo, her work focuses on how Internet applications and services are woven into everyday lives. Obsessed with memory and sentiment, in her spare time Churchill researches how people manage their digital and physical archives. She rates herself a packrat, her greatest joy is an attic stuffed with memorabilia.