Print to Digital – Change Resistant
So I jumped back into the online news world and it has delightfully brought back all these grandiose ideas, things I wanted to try when I left this business, things I thought would work, etc. Little did I know a lot of folks still in 2010 are having trouble letting go.
It doesn’t help that the company I now work for, Journal Register Company, had a corporate mandate not too long ago that prohibited its newsrooms to post any news that wasn’t at least two days old and a max of four stories a day (all from what I’ve been told). This is absurd to me. Think it was hard to get print-born folks to transform before, try to now break them from a previous communist corporate parent that would burn you to the ground if you disobeyed its laws.
Luckily JRC signed on John Paton as their CEO and put Jeff Jarvis on the board, well maybe not put, he was probably asked. Paton is all about good journalism and digital first. Jarvis is well, Jarvis. If you don’t know anything about him, Google him; he makes sense, and says things that some of us ‘younger’ online news folks have been saying for years. He makes sense, he is all about trying new things and empowering not just employees but your community. Makes sense.
Empowering the Workforce
Empowering the employees to push into the digital age, this is no small task, actually it’s a huge undertaking. I have signed on as lead web developer and have seen first-hand the damage that has been done by the former leaders of JRC, yeah we have an acronym, how about that for digital.
Everyone seems a bit timid, scared to share ideas; everyone seems like they are waiting to be told what to do. That’s not really my style, I like to express my ideas, my opinions in the digital space. I understand it and I feel I have a good knack for newspaper.com UI design and organization of data. I guess we will see if that is indeed true. I am a bit OCD and someone just today said my whiteboard looks like an Excel Spreadsheet….perfect 
Stop…Project Time
I have embarked on my first major project, a video page. I know seems odd that when I went to Viddler I had advertising experience and my first project was Adworks and now going back to the news/advertising world my first project is video. Odd how that works. As I started to create mockups I threw together (like really threw it together) your standard boring two-column layout; Content Rail vs. Right Rail. Absolute snooze fest but you have to do the defacto layout or you will be asked to see the status-quo.
Next I did an approach I really adore. Instead of organizing your data into vertical columns, start organizing your data in horizontal columns and within those spaces, set up anywhere from one to four columns. I feel this type of approach when done correctly causes users to actually look at a page and not just ignore everything on the right, which we all do, it’s the ‘ad rail’.
So in the top horizontal rail I had two columns, one giant 16×9 video player and a companion ad and blurb to the right. The next space also had two columns but one with a 150px left accordion style category navigation and the right column is filled with pagination, sorting options and your video thumbnails. The last space has two columns as well but all the columns in each space are different sizes and staggered. In this space the first column is another cube ad then a space for one to two blurbs, depending on their size.
The Reaction
The reaction to the designs was no surprise to me. The folks in the Interactive department like the ‘non-standard’ approach, the local staff we reached out to like the standard two column vertical layout. Surprise, surprise. Not really. If you did print forever and your sites really still mimicked print, layout-wise, you too would favor the norm. It’s comforting, soothing and I don’t have to think about it; I read from left to right, top to bottom per column; no skills required.
The new layout is a bit shocking for some. ‘What do you mean there is no rail’ or ‘Users won’t get it’. Well let’s not go that far….WE HAVE NEVER TRIED IT! Users are comfortable with the standard layouts because that’s all we give them. People resist change, but change is good. Change is quite normal and I feel users are smarter than we make them out to be. By saying ‘Users won’t get it’ is an easy out for ‘I don’t get it’.
Change Resistant
When Facebook changes their layout everyone shits themselves and starts a Facebook group to change it back to the old layout, why? Because we are creatures of habit, don’t make me think. No, use your brain, demand better. Facebook is making your layouts better, you just can’t see it because you are too busy bitching on Facebook about Facebook. Same for newspaper.com sites, or really any site. People complain about the sites on the site for two weeks, then it’s over. What’s funny is on the next redesign the same thing happens. It’s natural.
Obviously what we are doing now doesn’t really work, it sort of works I guess but it needs to be better. I feel strongly about these changes and all the changes I want to bring to JRC and their digital platform which I will write about as we get to them, no spoilers here.
My suggestion is this: Don’t resist change try it, there are always better, more efficient ways to do things but if you don’t try them it will never get easier, it will never get better. Work smarter, not harder. You don’t need to work 16 hour days, to me this is a waste and causes a huge crash down the road and ultimately burnout. You are just throwing hours at something that doesn’t make sense, get a plan of attack and well, attack.
The news will always be published, but the medium will change time and time again. People want news, they actually need it. Your profession is respected. It doesn’t matter how it reaches the customer, just so it reaches the customer.
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Time will tell, but it sounds like JRC is on the right track, and you know it’s hard to get a compliment from me.