Slipr

Also redundant coverage. Do we really need 635 versions of the same wire story cropping up on Google News?

“serious journalism was described at the conference, repeatedly, as something like broccoli, or medicine the citizenry needs to spoon down, no matter how unpalatable, if democracy is to survive.” He “[struggled] to think of another industry that views its premium product as something akin to a nasty cough syrup - necessary, good for your health, but irredeemably foul-tasting.” He wondered, shouldn’t at least some of the value and energy journalists now place in investigative and civic journalism be placed toward making their work more “palatable?”

Nanny-Journalism is the mother of all news business problems from The Future of News

First, some context: Michel Gondry’s movie Be Kind, Rewind has apparently inspired dozens of amateur filmmakers to do their own slap-dash remakes of famous hollywood films. Below, a fine example of the genre, known as Sweding.

The more times you’ve watched Total Recall, the funnier this will be. (And if you haven’t watched it at all, well, this won’t make any sense.)

via NewTeevee

I say that as a fan.

Also as someone who is totally psyched that in the process of rebuilding the site, they moved it to an open platform, namely Drupal.

But to take a magazine that is as rich in visual content as PopSci, and boil it down to a homepage that only includes 10 posts, or 11 if you count the header, plus only two right-column elements for featuring content by other means (plus a candybar at the bottom — which is the one unqualified good move on this redesign), I mean come on.

This is a homepage that cannot even accommodate a single day’s worth of content. What happens when they increase their posting volume?

Look, what am I going to compare this to — the blogs it apes? Even Engadget manages to get, by my count, 17 articles above the fold on my monitor. Ten of which are accompanied by click-boosting thumbnails or images. Granted Engadget is a little dense these days.

Let’s condense this into a bulleted list of the information architecture and design faux pas:

* Article-featuring header requires user click to access additional stories. (Sciam.com does this too and I hate it.) Here’s a rule: every click you put between a user and a piece of content reduces the frequency with which they’ll access it by a factor of 10. If you’re going to feature articles in a header, users have to be able to scan them visually in a microsecond — this is why Slate hasn’t changed their 6-article header (5 thumbnails and a big image — with extra headlines) in forever.

* Magazines are not blogs. They just aren’t. None of them. Wired.com features blog posts on their homepage — but their homepage isn’t a blog. New York magazine and Radar put their blogs front and center — but along with a bunch of other stuff. (etc.) Even blog networks — which are entirely composed of blogs! — do better when they don’t turn their homepages into blogs. (Also.)

* Page templates that do not vary between homepages and article pages are for blogs that aren’t sophisticated enough to differentiate the two. Not magazines that should know better — people have different needs when they land on your homepage vs. an article page.

I could go on, but it feels like beating a dead horse. I hate to say it, but in a lot of ways the old site was better (from an end-user perspective). I’m going to assume this is just round 1 of an ongoing development process… so much is possible given the platform PopSci has chosen — just look what Fast Company and The Onion have accomplished.

Update: I should specify that I admire Fast Company’s attempts to tightly integrate community. But from a design and usability perspective, the homepage of Fast Company, itself, is a complete disaster.

More at SciAm.com: Even Skeptics Admit Global Warming is Real [Video]

Layoffs at the New York Times are nothing new, but neither is its dominance on the web:

the Project for Excellence in Journalism… concluded that Americans are still relying on the same sources for most of their news, but just getting to them in different ways. The “legacy media” — CNN, MSNBC, CBS, The New York Times — in both their original and Internet forms are attracting even larger audiences than they did before the explosion of information sites on the Web.

The problem, and it’s gratifying to hear actual media professionals with actual data say this, because I’ve been beating this drum for a while, is that advertisers have yet to catch up:

Newsrooms, rather than being disconnected from the public, are seen as the “more innovative and experimental part of the news industry.” By contrast, “my middle management in advertising and distribution is where I see the deer-in-the-headlights look,” one publisher told PEJ.

Which is sort of like spring break for geeks.

No time to blog, so mostly will just be twittering on my ghetto-ass last-gen ibook while everyone else records the proceedings via their $600 1st edition iphones and/or blackberry pearls on unlimited plans.

Oh and it took me 27 hours to get here instead of just 8.

Jeff Jarvis may be all about “do what you do best and link to the rest,” but if he were actually, you know, working for an online news organization he’d know that the real traffic building these days is in “do what you do best and syndicate the rest.”

Except that sometimes that goes horribly awry, as in CBS’s decision to start syndicating content from National Review, thus turning the website of the most-watched television network into a bullhorn for climate change deniers.

Because, aside from io9, you’re the only member of Nick Denton’s blahg empire that talks about, you know, science.

Watch them name check:

Scientific American: Girl Talk

New Scientist: Women Love To ‘Fuck’ Just As Much As Men

The Times Magazine: Should Boys And Girls Be Separated At School?

So you know how Fast Company has all of a sudden integrated a whole community solution into their site? Well I was wondering how they did it — I mean they don’t have a huge budget, and they did it really fast.

Then I saw their site on a list of companies that use Drupal to build their entire sites, and it hit me:

Drupal has native community features

Now I’m not saying that every media organization on earth could follow in their footsteps, mostly because Drupal demands an entire suite of skills many web teams don’t have (but should…) but it just illustrates what really small, nimble teams can accomplish when they’re not fettered by legacy systems — or are willing and able to jettison them.

Every day I see examples like this — small, nimble organizations taking out much larger ones at the knees, mostly because they have no sacred cows. What I wouldn’t give to have a 6d10 +10/+5 sword of bureaucracy slaying…

Update: Dave Cohn, from whose twitter stream I originally gleaned the post on sites that use Drupal, himself an experienced Drupal slinger, did an interview with Ed Sussman, who redid the Fast Company site.

Tammy Haddad, former executive producer of Hardball, got herself a small image-stabilized video camera that records straight to memory cards and has set herself up as an independent media consultant and video blogger. (Details here.)

Mostly this illustrates that the technology has fallen so far in price ($700 for the Sanyo HD1000 High-Definition Camcorder; about $10 a gig for the anywhere from 4 to 16 gig SDHC cards it records to) and become so simple to use that it would simply be wasteful not to record on-location interviews on video.

Given her experience, whatever they’re paying Tammy is probably about 10-20x the monetizable value of the product she’s generating. Not her fault, but given the sorry state of web advertising and the newness of magazines-as-video destinations, it’s going to be a while before it makes economic sense to do this as anything other than a value-add to existing coverage.

By the way Newsweek, you guys are idiots for disabling embedding of Tammy’s videos. Good luck getting enough views to satisfy your advertisers without the extra views you could have garnered by letting bloggers and the like splash her political coverage across their sites.