I've been checking out the screenshots and early weekend implementation of the new CNN.com redesign. Several of my journalist and non-journalist friends have been weighing in on links I've posted on Facebook (although my CNN buds have been keeping fairly quiet, as is proper. I did same in public forums when I worked there).
Disclaimer: I was a cyberculture columnist for CNN.com from 2002-2005, where I often had to advocate for certain "bloggish" types of discourse that were not generally permitted on the site because the online common wisdom or ways of knowing (crowd-sourced consensus on cyber-topics, usually) couldn't be traced to some important person quoted as saying "X" (an absolute requirement for CNN.com at the time), or because online "conventional" wisdom didn't necessarily jive with journalistic copyediting standards of "The Row" at that time.
Times have certainly changed, both in the network and with the site's embrace of citizen media (something I was also an early advocate for), and now, in its turn toward the site stylings of online "opinion writing" found at Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, among other blog and news aggregators (more on that below).
For what it's worth, a full archive of my CNN.com columns can be viewed here. I was employed by Turner Broadcasting from 2001 to the end of 2006, when I moved to NYC to take a position at Razorfish, ironically, the company responsible for the CNN.com 2007 redesign (UX and creative). I was not involved in the redesign at either company.
That should cover all necessary disclaimers. All I'm doing here is giving my impressions on the 2009 redesign (largely positive, I'll tell you why), in spite of my friends' initial reactions on Facebook (largely negative, I can speculate why), and what I think may have been lost from what I considered a visually stunning "liquid" (the gray modular look) redesign as proposed by Razorfish and executed by CNN.com in 2007.
What follows is my opinion and my opinion only, and in no way represents the views of any of my employers, past or present.
First, here's an overview of what I've been reading on the subject (also found at my Delicious Bookmarks):
Beet.TV: CNN Now in "Horse Race" with Huffington Post and Daily Beast
By Andy Plesser
CNN.com has taken notice of the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast as "opinion destinations" and wants to be a "horse in that race," CNN.com General Manager KC Estenson told me last night, after the industry introduction of the revamped CNN.com site. (transcript below)
At an after-event party at the Hudson, we sat down for this chat.
He said that Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown, founder of the Daily Beast, had done "really nice things" with their sites.
He said that CNN.com already has a stable of 100 contributors, both inside and outside CNN, and wants to build out the effort by surfacing them in a new page called CNN Opinion, which goes live on Monday as part of the site redesign.
He said he plans to add as many as 10 new contributors a month.
CNN’s New Look Includes an ‘iTunes’ for News - Digits - WSJ
[...] Among its features is NewsPulse, which he described as “like an iTunes for news” — a sortable, categorizable list of every story and video on the site. CNN also announced new content. In addition to adding a new entertainment section and opinion section, he said the new site will host a big backlog of video speeches from the California intellectual-utopian conference TED, which hosts people like Jane Goodall and Bill Gates.
On Nov. 9, the site will host a live video discussion with Oprah Winfrey’s book club, incorporating questions and commentary on social-networking site Facebook.
[...]
“I like the breadth of it,” Jonathan Klein, CNN’s U.S. president, said. He added that he also liked how the top of every page said CNN, rather than CNN.com.
CNN.com relaunch to focus on video | Media | guardian.co.uk
As you can see in the screenshot, the new homepage is split into three, allowing CNN to give play to video and infotainment – something of a trend in online news.
"The left hand column is the story of the day and underneath the user will find the daily headlines," says Wrenn. "Breaking news is our core brand and will continue to have a prominent spot. But we wanted to showcase a lot more of the deep, rich content we have. It was falling off the main page too quickly and people couldn't find it.
[...]
The redesigned CNN.com also seems generally to attach a greater importance to its entertainment section. Asked whether this reflects lessons from Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post – which mixes entertainment content into its political news and views, and has grown 67% in a year when CNN.com has only grown 3.7% – Wrenn says that it merely shows how important entertainment already was to CNN. "On the domestic US site, the entertainment section brought in September with 19m more page views than politics with 17m. And for CNN International we can speak of the same trend. For us the news is still first, but we have to move in other directions as well."
[...]
So the new site will make a step towards the user to be more appealing: new personalisation functionality enables users to customise a column on the front with sports scores or stock prices, local headlines or weather, and CNN's community-based iReport site will be featured in a curated section on the homepage, as well as in the middle of unfolding stories.
CNN.com won't focus too much on new social media features, though, beyond existing partnerships with Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, with CNN breaking news counting 2.8m Twitter followers.
CNN Bringing iReport Closer - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek
By Michael Hickens
[...] In contrast to the way it treats user generated content now, which is to quarantine it on a separate domain, iReport.com, CNN plans to fold the content under a tab on the new CNN.com site. Moreover, CNN will no longer tag stories they've actually vetted with "On CNN" (since they'll all be "on" CNN), but rather tag stories that haven't been vetted.
"We're basically legitimizing citizen journalists," Lila King, a senior producer for iReport, told me. It might be about time.
CNN gets approximately 16,000 iReport stories per month, or an average of 500 a day. In order to vet more of them, King told me, editors will get a hand from yet more crowd-sourcing in the form of social media indicators (as stories get voted up by visitors).
Redesigned CNN.com: More Opinion, Entertainment, Integrated iReport And Oprah | paidContent
[...] Citizen journalism project iReport will no longer be a standalone site; users will be redirected to a section on the main site, which will allows users to continue to upload their photos and stories. CNN.com editors will vet stories and give the independent reports more formal play. All stories on CNN.com will allow comments as well. [emphasis mine, cb]
[...]
CNN.com’s numbers have generally been pretty good. Data provided by comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) to paidContent showed that last month, traffic was up 11 percent to 33 million uniques, while FoxNews, which tends to dominate CNN in the TV ratings, had only 10 million uniques and was down 15 percent.
Major CNN.com Re-Design Brings Video To The Forefront | Online | Mediaite
[...] The article pages – like one about Mad Men (on next page), provide video as the featured element, and include more video features on the left column to be pulled out for wider viewing. Also, and key for bloggers: “All the video will be embeddable…we totally rebuilt the video player and it’s sweet.” [emphasis mine, cb]
CNN.com is a major destination on the web – with 38 million visitors a month, and 1.7 billion page views. But as Estenson said in his presentation, the current form is “largely text-driven and text-orientated.”
“In some ways it feels like a machine that spits out breaking news,” he said. The new CNN.com was based on five factors: breaking news, video, perspective and analysis, personal relevance, and easy to use.
OK, so what's my take?
There's a lot more that's been written and now floating around in the Commons on the redesign (probably much more now), but the articles above seem to touch on a lot of the issues that pertain most about the features I care about.
First thing that pops out at me is that KC Estenson seems to be a really powerful force behind both the visual aspects of the redesign and the deep structural changes which would be required to execute and embrace more aspects of the social media cyberculture than CNN.com has done previously.
That may have been the piece of the puzzle that was missing in the 2007 redesign. It had a visual surface that was integrated with social media, but didn't (and could not) address the fact that the editorial cultures at CNN, its deep structure interfaces, were profoundly skeptical toward opening the news hole toward different styles of discourse, different sorts of contributions to what will be the whole package of editorial content branded as CNN by the network.
Lila King has some great quotes above too, and she has been instrumental in shepherding the greater prominence of iReport through that skeptical editorial ecosystem (gotta give a shout-out to my buddy Tyson Wheatley, who has been working in this area too. To know Tyson is to see his energy and imprint in the style and character of many aspects of iReport, as well as another friend, Eric Lanford, who showcased a lot of this content in his HLN program "News to Me.").
But let's say something about the source of that general skepticism, because in many cases, it could be well-founded, especially from the POV of a traditional journalist. While the energy and immediacy of iReport content can seem self-evident to social media proponents (as well as to anyone who followed Twitter during the Mumbai attacks or during the Iranian elections), there is also the very real risk of fraud and exploitation of that media channel for personal or political gain.
If one allows content to stream from unvetted sources, it can be profoundly democratizing, it opens closed mass media spaces to voices previously excluded from that powerful megaphone, and some people will undoubtedly seek ways of exploiting that opening for less-than-pure-and-democratic motives. Some people already have, and I'm sure Lila, Tyson, and Eric, as well as KC Estenson to some degree, have spent many an hour wrestling with the Pandora's Box of potential bad outcomes iReport has unleashed.
Which is not to say "Don't do it!" Rather, it means do it carefully. Create new forms of vetting and checking of sources and allegations. Don't close off the firehose, but also don't let it whipshaw about and madly spray full force of its own accord. That's what has to happen as new editorial forces are brought into the Commons.
So there has to have been a sea change in the editorial culture of CNN, to get to this place. The rebranding of CNN.com to simply "CNN" jumped out at me in the article above. That's a biggie within the Turner universe, and I'd probably chalk that and other efforts at greater integration of different media properties, both Turner and Time Warner, as a net effect of the advertising belt-tightening of the Great Recession.
Even so, opening up all stories to public comment is not so much radical and new as it is a throwback to the old CNN.com of the dot.com boom, when there was an entire staff devoted to "Community" boards and forums, a staff that was jettisoned just as quickly in the crash of early 2001, when CNN.com lost fully half of its employees. [NOTE: as of the Monday official launch, comments are still not enabled on most stories. One has to scan the News Pulse section in order to discover the stories that allow commenting.]
Back then, they couldn't even get the AOL walled garden to support a CNN video player, or to play nice with any CNN.com material. Now all those other Time Warner media properties are eyeing CNN.com's terrific traffic numbers and are coming down to the basement of the Atlanta CNN Center to sing Kumbayah.
But many of my friends on Facebook have also mentioned how CNN here is taking a turn to the blog, most particularly like WordPress, not just in content styles but in layout and design. Which leads me to wonder if it is true that... (apologies Bob Dylan)
Everybody Must Get Blogged?
I don't mean this, and yet I do, so let me clarify. The blog influence on the design of the landscape of cyberspace has been profound, and invisible, only to those unaware of how pervasive it is, MORE pervasive than the influence of advertising and commercial marketing sites. It is LESS pervasive than the influence of Google on the design and landscape of cyberspace because Google is the shaper of All as embodied in the Google Gaze (postmodernists will have fun with this one for decades!).
The Gaze of Google is not just the all-seeing Panoptic Eye, it is also shapes broad social behaviors online, behaviors performed on behalf of Google. The Google bot "audience" has become as important an audience as actual human eyeballs in shaping the structure of cyberspace. Google creates the theater in which web communicators perform. What it blesses is blessed, and what it curses is cast into the bottomless pit, with much weeping and gnashing of teeth!
So something funny happened on the way to redesigns of major commercial sites and portals. Behind the scenes, thankfully, CSS was taking over the world. Like HTML, CSS is simple, easy to replicate, easy to modify. It still isn't a perfect world, but for web designers, CSS along with RSS has helped to unbind content from its direct display (style).
So when Razorfish did that wonderful redesign of CNN.com back in 2007, I found an interesting design pattern starting to appear in Blogland, especially among developers of WordPress themes (where all the real blog design action is, sorry Typepad). With CSS spreading so rapidly across web implementations (thankfully), WordPress theme developers were designing blogs to display in more modular and less column-driven formats. In doing so, with ease of access to CSS, they were discovering that there was no content site that a WordPress blog could not in some way mimic or appropriate in terms of visual design.
Which is why, when digging around in archives of WordPress themes shortly after the 2007 redesign of CNN.com launched, I stumbled across an almost identical appropriation of the red and gray CNN.com page design. There was enough that was different to keep it from being called an outright copyright violation, but it was on a site of WordPress themes that was moving heavily toward emphasizing modules over columns, and more fluidly adapting to content "teaser" space over full content display.
What does this mean (as Martin Luther might say)?
The articles above point to the 2009 CNN.com redesign as also adapting to a media landscape that includes Huffington Post and The Daily Beast as major players. HuffPo has been in Movable Type since its inception (I haven't checked lately to see if it still uses a Movable core), but more importantly, its page has gotten visually wider and busier in its design in the past year, particularly in the strident promotion of "teaser" space in modules. Sometimes I think HuffPo has gotten too "shouty" and busy in its design, but that's another discussion.
My friends have reacted against a busier and more modular display on the new 2009 CNN.com. My own inclination is to disagree with this initial impression. I like some of the things happening above the fold on the new design, but to go into my reasons why, let's take a look at the 2007 redesign.
I still think this is just SO pretty! I guess I should mourn the loss of the gray around the modules, as that was the part I really loved.
But if I were to criticize this design for one thing, it would be for a web-wide bias toward text over images. I was a newspaper photographer and print designer for many years, and the greatest loss in the migration to the web has been, in my mind, the overwhelming trend of turning images into postage stamps. It is still happening, even more so now in places like HuffPo, as the design pattern of linking every teaser headline to a thumbnail image becomes so dominant (a net increase in the number of images, so generally, a trend I would support).
So the way I'd improve the design above would be to make the use of images stronger, more dramatic, and less upstaged by text, particularly gray-box undistinguished text, as in "Latest News" above.
Which is one thing the new design of CNN.com does, especially in expanding the use of the new video player. Finally, they are abandoning the segregation of video content from the rest of the site (a holdover from Pipeline) and are integrating video everywhere. That really matters less to me than the design aspect of showcasing the static image representation for the video player as a large dominant IMAGE on the page.
Some of my friends complain that there's "less news" on the newly designed page, with its three columns acting as dynamic modules. My interpretation of that response is the same as in the old fights I had in print newsrooms in the 80s. Every time images get more dramatic billing, Word-People complain that they're seeing fewer words, as if this is a zero-sum game. In print, it often could be, with the limitation of column inches, but the zero-sum feeling was overcome when dramatic images pull more people into pages who wouldn't have dwelled on the content otherwise. Images are a portal into words for many people. I'm not trying to force feed us all into a shallow image-driven world, as my life is as much about text-literacy as visual-literacy, but I just want to call out the fact that this doesn't have to be a push-me-pull-you opposition.
On the web, it is even less of a zero-sum game, because web pages expand to fill the content on them, and images give us the same sort of portals into textual content. However, screen size is the demon here, and it is a bugger I've been wrestling with since I put my first home page online in 1994 with a 500-pixel wide image (I hate compromising when it comes to pictures).
So this new CNN.com redesign is all about the new image-and thumbnail-driven modular trend for major publishers and blog design. In TV-land they would tell you they know this story very well, because it is all about what you tease and how you tease it. TV understands the need for teasers.
That's sort of a counter for the main limitation of a site built with video content as its core. No matter how small you chunk up your video, an unplayed video link is still a black box, a piece of linear content inaccessible to crawlers and page readers, a tax on bandwidth and load time.
I gotta hand it to CNN to finally making the site about the video (and by extension, with latest developments in journalism, Digital Storytelling). This time the redesign seems to reflect a change in the culture of the network, which has structurally adjusted its news gathering apparatus to reflect the decline in ad revenue from the Great Recession, and the influence of citizen media and the Cyberculture Commons.
Journalists are not going to give up their attachment to the linear story that demands attention from beginning to end, no matter what sort of media make up that form. It is a limitation of sorts, so long as those files are still "playable" files, as slideshows or video, because they are still time-based media.
Static images and text live outside of time-based media and are visually-scannable and passively readable. They have greater communicative immediacy, simply because they don't live inside a black box requiring a click for access. They also lend themselves more readily to nonlinear reading, scanning, and linking styles. They incorporate better into a hypertextual universe, which is what the Web/Internet is, a world of nonlinear access to anything, in decontextualized, unbound forms.
Time-based media requires context and linear attention. Ultimately, that works against it, like being an orange in an apple-universe.
And, most importantly, it leaves time-based media absolutely at the mercy of the quality and access to its non-time-based media non-linear teaser content: images and text.
What is lost from the 2007 redesign?
Let me just preface this with my initial impression that I don't think very much is lost at all. I've lived with the CNN.com site as an important part of my life since before I ever went to work at the network in Atlanta. I've saved screenshots from the site going back through many earlier iterations (so I'm an obsessive news junkie, so sue me!).
Looking through those old screenshots, I notice that the biggest change over time on the site is due to change in page width conventions on the web: bandwidth and screen width conventions. I have not measured the new site, but my sense is that, for the home page at least, they are pushing on industry page width conventions, edge to edge, with content in every available space above the fold, and with second and third folds down the page.
Interior pages and story page templates appear to be not quite as wide and as loaded with content--visibly narrower to my eyeballs, over this weekend rollout, at least.
One of the articles linked above mentions an interview with a staffer, or maybe it was Estenson, that metric analysis revealed vastly stronger traffic on the home page than on interior pages. So they are loading up that home page, to act as more of a strong portal.
There's a counter to that report, to my mind: CNN.com navigational clarity has always been weak, and back when they used in-house search on the site, I often couldn't FIND stories I knew were there, stories I was working on updating, right there in the building! It used to make me crazy. This is extremely common for many mainstream media content sites: poor navigation and sub-standard on-site search leads users who genuinely value the site to employ "Navigation by Google." (insert your most reliable search engine here.)
Best thing that ever happened to mass media sites was support for major search crawlers and SEO, but try to tell them that, and many sites will still sing the song of joy and nostalgia for the good old walled gardens (arrgh!). Just listen to Rupert Murdoch and Steven Brill and others singing that song these days. There's a scary Halloween story for you.
So if the CNN.com main page is sucking most of the traffic as a portal, the flip side of that is that users are accessing stories on the Long Tail from Search, from off-site, using navigation by Google or RSS Feeds or what-have-you. Or they aren't accessing content archives from within the site once that content is no longer timely enough to rate the position on the CNN.com home page. It looks like CNN.com is prepared to cede that territory to the search engines.
The good news is that KC Estenson doesn't appear to be listening to Steven Brill et. al. and all that hot firewall talk making the rounds. The launch last year of the CNN wire service to compete with AP also reveals that the network sees opportunity in the Associated Press's antagonism to search engines and crawlers, opportunity to build business while the AP is cutting off its nose to spite its own face.
That is also revealed in the embrace of content partners (like TED and Oprah) and opinion content, which I haven't gone into here, but which I roundly applaud and am really excited to see. That should be some cool stuff! Seriously, smart move on CNN's part. CNN is acting like it wants to be a citizen of the ever-expanding Cyberculture Commons, instead of a carpet-bagger raiding the commons for eyeballs in a zero-sum game.
Some may bemoan a loss of "authority" with the opening of CNN.com to more volatile or opinionated content, but I am not one of them. I want features like iReport integrated cautiously, and the same done with the opinion columnists. But what really excites me is that CNN will gain energy and discussion space in the Commons with this influx of ideas and public debate, quality public debate. This is what democracy is about, and CNN is basically saying it doesn't want to be standing in a walled garden while the real work of democracy is taking place somewhere else.
I am mostly remembering my minor skirmishes with The Row over mild-mannered assertions in my column about RSS or the state of the Blogosphere in 2003, assertions that gate-keeper copyeditors would not let me utter in the sanctioned space of CNN.com-proper, only because the established politicians and the established media and tech commentators had not yet opened up the topic for conversation in their "Commons" of MSM public opinion, so I could quote them and claim greater "authority."
Thus, certain tech/cyberculture topics were rendered invisible, simply because people important enough to quote hadn't gotten around to talking about them yet. That left CNN.com caught in an anachronistic echo-chamber, a closed loop.
The Cyberculture Commons shrugged itself into existence because that closed loop had turned into a MSM stranglehold on the discourse and the topics of the public commons. What people are actually talking about will always vault ahead of those who would presume to set the agenda for the commons. What CNN is doing here is a good move for keeping pace with those shifting conversations, rather than risk being left behind by them.
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