Last week’s news
marco writes:
Most news outlets, including TV news shows and networks, newspapers, news websites, and blogs are targeted at news junkies: they never want to miss a story, and they want to be the first to report it to you.If you look back on these stories even one week later, the majority of them seem unimportant or redundant…
The problem goes back to a fact Google CEO Eric Schmidt pointed out as recently as December in a WSJ op-ed. “Every time I return to a [news] site, I am treated as a stranger,” he wrote.
The fix for this problem — the conundrum of appeasing the news junkies while not forgetting the casual consumer — is to remember who our readers are.
For all the finger pointing Schmidt has done over this shortcoming, it’s ironic that he has yet to actually solve the problem with Google’s own products. Fast Flip is rudimentary; Google News doesn’t have the answer; and Google Reader’s solution is to basically pile up everything into an inbox without any good way of surfacing what’s most relevant in the mound.
Our editors should objectively rank the importance of each story as they place them on the site. The site would remember the last time you visited and how far you dug into the content off the home page. If you haven’t been back in a week, the front page would show you what’s been relevant in the last week. If you return an hour later, you’ll get a sort of stream of all the new content we’ve added most recently.
Such a scenario is still a long way out. Right now, everything on the L.A. Times home page is hand-crafted; everything is thought out, and a producer molds our flexible design architecture into one that’s most relevant for the set of stories on file. Kind of like the front page of the newspaper.
Feedly is a decent step towards an importance-driven layout, but the designs are rigid. In other words, Marco is right. There’s no solution for this yet.
