Slipr

One of the first rules of writing web-friendly headlines is extracting the most unique or compelling detail from a piece and making that the headline. It’s the difference between getting dugg and being ignored.

But this is just annoying.

This is like following the headline “STDs Rampant in 5th Graders” with the dek “More 10 year olds have herpetitis than at any point except for two years ago, oh and all the years before 2000 when there was a frakking epidemic (you moron).”

This is why magazines aren’t nearly as threatened by the internet as newspapers:

Unlike newspapers, there is nothing on the internet that reproduces the magazine experience and is also better than magazines.

Magazines look good and, unlike awkward broadsheets, provide an excellent user experience. It doesn’t matter that (if they’re a monthly) they were written two months ago, because they’re about things that have a longer shelf-life. They’re where we go for insight and reportage, not news.

Some day there will be a device that at least mimics the magazine reading experience. However:

“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”

Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now? | New York Observer

Sticking article tools and related content in the flow of an article’s text is nothing new, and there’s plenty of evidence that it works better than most anything else in terms of click-through — or did you think the text on a typical New York times article was lately sandwiched between article tools and supplementary content just because their designers like it that way?

(It used to be more of a sinuous river hugging the curves of the tools and extra links, which I think is more effective — as soon as you put text into a rigid column you’re telling the reader to ignore what’s to the left and right of it — it might be ads.)

But this is new: Wired isn’t sticking its own content into what’s normally a related content space, it’s sticking Portfolio’s content into that space.

Previously, sites like Slate and WaPo have cross-promoted each other’s content in designated ghettos in their right columns (which, due to the ads, are a visual and click-through no-man’s land) but this is probably much more effective.

Granted, by doing this Wired is in part devaluing that territory — if I’m a Wired reader who doesn’t care about Portfolio (and I bet there’s a lot of them), I’m now being trained to ignore that space.

On the other hand, the last time I saw cross-promotion this well integrated was on Gawker, where whole posts (or at least the part before the ‘click to read more’) are regularly cross-posted and are the only reason I and probably a lot of other readers ever bothered to check out Jezebel in the first place — it showed up on Gawker.

It’s nice to see this space maturing, and everyone getting better at pimping their own material rather than watching it fall into the abyss of the archive.

Oil is getting scarce. OK, no problem, we drive smaller cars.

Water is getting scarce. Food is getting scarce. No problem, we desalinate, we put more land under cultivation.

But: Land is getting scarce. Oops.

From the end of Food Prices Rise, Farmers Respond

Despite the back-to-back increases [in price of commodities like soybeans and corn], the number of acres under cultivation [in the U.S.] is still about six million below the level of a decade ago. The government is not entirely sure why that is happening, but one possibility is that some land has been swallowed up by suburban construction.

Higher demand + inflexible supply = higher prices. The economic equation is so elementary it is a wonder we are not having a more urgent discussion about it.

I suppose the answer is that this will, as always, affect the poor first. Adios, developing world.

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.