Walter Williams vs. Web 2.0

I cancelled my usual Sunday designer’s meeting to meet with our editor-in-chief, Jason Pesick, about the state of our current boring site and its future redesign. As I updated him, I tried to explain some of the next interface’s Web 2.0 application-like features.

One of my cool, customisable ideas was to give the user the capability to be their own editor, allowing them to do to a common news site what Rollyo does for search engines. After all, if they visit the site for the Sports and Arts sections, why don’t we give them the power to change the page’s layout so it always places emphasis on those sections, giving those stories front-page priority? Once again, microcustomisation is king, and the web is certainly no different.

Jason, however, didn’t reply with the fanfare I was expecting. Any web geek would love to hear Web 2.0, AJAX, RSS, and modularity thrown around when the template I’m constructing for them costs them roughly $600.00. Instead, Jason hesitated, frowning.

“You see,” he paused. “The Web is very… democratic. We, as editors, see this and are afraid of it. We believe that we know what’s better for the reader… will people read about [the Darfur genocide] if we don’t put it on the front page?”

We ended up straying off the topic of aesthetics: this was a debate about the future of journalism, not that of a template’s design. I tried to explain to him (on a non-technical level) a bit about Web 2.0, web usability, and where not only the Internet was going, but where the Internet was taking journalism. I had to attack the issue from two sides: that of a designer and that of a managing editor.

Trial by design: Usability for non-Jakob Nielsens

From a designer’s perspective, we have to examine the user’s experience and build a site around their natural intellectual framework much like an industrial designer does with ergonomics. Unfortunately for us, the mental capacities and preferences that people have change much more person-to-person than their corporal selves, requiring an extensive amount of site customisation from a copy perspective. Fortunately for us, there are also guidelines for things that annoy people greatly on the web, and this is where interface usability comes in.

I’m no Nielsen – and I’m not going to pretend to be – but I can tell a good interface and usable website from a poor one after 15 years of experience with the Internet. I know what works and what doesn’t, and I also know what I find annoying on websites. As a user (I do actually use the Daily’s site RSS feeds,) I find myself primarily gravitating toward magazine content and the news, ignoring most of the rest of it. While the news, being on the front page, is easily accessible from the root directory and quite usable for me, I have to click a minimum of three links to read a magazine article on days when the magazine isn’t published (i.e., every day except Thursday.) This means that, as a user, I have to take the time to fish through a bunch of “useless” information and content that I have no interest in to get to the content that I want.

Let’s extrapolate this point to a more extreme yet statistically common user of the site. What does a user that wants both our Sports section’s and Opinion columnists’ content, the two most frequently accessed and commented-upon types of content? Sports ends up as a secondary or tertiary feature periodically, but the majority of the time the sports content is relegated to its own section page and that “Other Sections” sidebar, which doesn’t offer any readable content other than obscure headlines. Opinion columns and sports content, on an average day, take up absolutely none of above-the-fold front page content space. That means that 100% of the site, upon first glance, is geared toward the absolute minority of the site’s demographic.

Jakob Nielsen would throw a fit: this is a usability nightmare, and this nightmare is exactly what I wanted to remedy with page customisation. After all, if the user can set their own preferences, then the maximum amount of content space available is always being used for the content that’s most valuable to the specific user. (From an economics perspective, this is the usability equivalent of monopolistic third-degree price discrimination, the most profitable way to price possible.)

Why, then, haven’t I done this already if I’ve noticed this blatant statistical shortcoming and known of its existence for months now? Couldn’t I at least make sure that the front page always contains (and features) the content that is statistically most-accessed? Technically, sure I could. As a designer, I would. As a managing editor that works as some journalistic abstraction layer to the world of technology, I’m not allowed to, otherwise we’d quite possibly have the most user-friendly college media site in the nation.

The journalist’s cross-examination to web usability

“We believe that we know what’s better for the reader.” It’s this very philosophy that’s shared by editors not only here but all over the print journalism industry. After all, there are only a few square feet to work with on the front page of a newspaper, and someone has to choose what goes on it.

There are a few papers that fill their front pages with what their editors believe is the most important to humanity, although probably not the most interesting to the general populace: one such example is the venerable New York Times. Generally, their print front page highlights international affairs and the Middle Eastern conflict with a small sports story tucked off to the side, barely peeking above the fold. This is what I call the academic approach to newspaper layout: put a snapshot of humanity on the front of the page. This layout ideology also supports the core of Walter Williams’s Journalist’s Creed, building the “journalism of humanity”, “unswayed by the appeal of privilege or the clamor of the mob.” In all honesty, the Times does a good job of putting what I want to read on the front page, but I’m a statistical anomaly; my content preferences are probably due to my own journalistic bias.

There is a more mathematical, capitalist approach to front page layout, and Gannett’s USA Today is a prime example of this. Stories on the front page are chosen for what will have the most popular appeal as opposed to their intellectual influence; the front page also uses a dazzling amount of photography, colour, and graphics. Gannett doesn’t do this because of overzealous designers: they do it because the statistics say to. It’s well known around here that sports features and more colour sell more papers. Because of this, they can proudly print the dubious honour of #1 in print circulation in their masthead. There is a downfall to this playing into the demands of the people: most people I talk to in journalism give USA Today and Gannett-owned papers a condescending glare for “going against the true spirit of journalism.”)

It is with this same condescension that the editors look down upon the democracy and socially-aware self-government of independent news sites such as MetaFilter and Digg as well as Internet media phenomena such as the blogosphere and Web 2.0. Hypocritically, however, they are amazed at the extensive amount of participation present on such sites and want to harness them for their own content. Herein lies the paradox of online journalism: they want Web 2.0 and its social audience without the social aspect that lies at the core of the Web 2.0 infrastructure.

Walter Williams vs. Web 2.0, Round 2

It will be interesting to see what gives in first: Williams or wallets. It’s already obvious that the Web won the first war. Print newspapers are fighting to stay alive as circulation drops and younger demographics move toward the abundance of information on the Internet; once the editors get to cyberspace, though, they realise that people won’t pay for subscription services and archives because free alternatives exist just a URI away. It leaves them to compete with the geeks, amateurs, and journalist-wannabes in their opponents’ own medium, and the editors can feel both their jobs and traditions slipping away. Either their careers or their traditions will end up obliterated due to technological obsolescence, and, as altruistic and philosophical as the editors want to be, my bet is that they’ll be eating humble pie (and their editorial traditions) soon enough.

And with that, I propose a toast. Here’s to the Internet. Let the freedom of Web 2.0 ring.

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