Poynter’s Steve Klein gives a nearly perfect description today of the redesign at the Chicago Tribune’s web site, stating:
Most news site redesigns these days seem to emphasize interactivity and social media. This redesign seems more traditional (old-fashioned?) in nature. It’s neat. It’s clean.
I agree with the “traditional” tag. Owned by the Tribune company, the Chicago paper has elements strongly resembling those of its sister papers The Orlando Sentinel, The Los Angeles Times and Newsday. But taking off what Klein said, there isn’t anything truly innovative about any of these sites’ designs. There’s nothing cutting edge.
And is that a bad thing? Are newspapers online the places where people want to go for social networking and blog reading? Is video-remixing really necessary?
What do you think?
{ 1 trackback }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s a strategic mistake, imho, to view the news site you’re running out of your newspaper newsroom as a newspaper.com site. That’s like the old days of TV news, where anchormen read the days paper on air. It’s a new medium. Web sites need to be web sites, not newspaper sites.
That’s a great point. I would say a lot of newspapers still identify with the paper brand online rather than the community who reads said paper online. But how do you break the ice on that one without upsetting paper people who don’t think the web stories matter nearly as much as what is in print?