The Vostok blog

Yesterday the new El País website launched and we thought we should celebrate it with a remake of our nytimes.com bar chart. To be honest, this one was much more fun to do: there are more periods of growth and restraint, more ups and downs, more information density, more pictures, less text.

But even more so because El País has gone through something The New York Times hasn’t: three very distinct identity crises. And our chart picks them up. It’s what we would call their ’5-year itch’: every 5 years El País renames itself, rebrands itself. El País digital became elpais.es in 2001, elpais.com in 2006 and today, in 2012, it’s called just plain and simply: El País.

But…What’s in a name? Especially, when you’re making the same mistakes.

I don’t think we’re being too harsh. Or are we?

Khoi is former Design Director of NYTimes.com, he has a blog called Subtraction and an elegant WordPress theme called Basic Maths. He’s also one of the most outspoken critics of how the news industry is dealing with changing consumption habits and vanishing revenue streams. He’s poignant but respectful, an insider who never quite stopped being an outsider. A designer we respect for upping the ante.

It’s quite discouraging to see so many failed attempts at adapting a product as important to society as newspapers that we felt we needed to ask the guy to go to for this subject to share his thoughts on what has changed, what newspapers are doing to adapt and why their changes are so timid. We encourage you to watch the full-length interview in case you want more information or, like me, are just curious about the man. If not, here’s a good 4min compilation of snippets of the most important things we touched on.

On a side note… One of Vostok‘s dream jobs would be, without a doubt, to design an online newspaper. It would also be one of our worst job nightmares…You have to deal with infinite layers and inevitable complex structures, not to mention the frustration of having to play by the rules when you know the rules are no longer valid. It’s not an easy task. You can read a compilation of what our stance is when it comes to online news design here.

Agree? Not agree? Let us know what you think.

To me, The Daily is a near perfect realization of exactly the idea that occurs to print editors every single time they get their hands on digital media for the first time, regardless of what the underlying technology might be: “Let’s make it just like what we know so well in print.” As a result I found it sadly lifeless and lacking in urgency. What a waste of US$30 million.

Khoi Vinh on The Daily

Here is the chart we displayed on yesterday’s video on the 15 years of NYTimes homepages where you can see the absolute lenght of each homepage year by year.

Here’s a bigger version.

We release it to the public domain. Feel free to copy, share or republish it.

Some major changes, not always apparent in the video:

• cleaner navigation
• ‘My Times’ a personalized NYTimes.com
• articles are more scanneable and scrolleable
• more videos, and better players
• the sections of most popular, most emailed, most blogged
• Times topics (articles organized by categories and not just sections)
• Articles can be printed and shared online

Years of trial and error redesigns, facelifts, surgeries and tests implemented by the NYTimes.com design team to keep in check. Admirable? Absolutely. Enough? No. What happened with less but better?

We just finished watching a great conference by Étienne Mineur from Les Éditions Volumiques about using game design concepts to connect “ce qui est digital avec ce qui est tangible”. Mineur focuses mainly on touchscreen-based boardgames, but touches briefly on two concepts we have recently been thinking about a lot:

• redefining information design to new devices and experiences
• planned obsolescence

It all comes down to market economics and rethinking the value of both paper and digital. Rethinking the concept of “fragile et précieux”. Take paper for example. Before, it was abundant and less valuable. Now, or in the near future, paper will be scarce (not because there won’t be any, but because we won’t use it) and more precious.

For Mineur the question lies in:

…comment les deux peuvent communiquer ensemble de manière intelligente et plutôt complémentaire. Il n’y a pas d’affrontement pour moi.

In other words, how can print and digital best complement each other?  How can they interact to make the most out of their features? How can they be combined to bring down opportunity costs? Think of a newspaper for example, or better still, a monthly magazine that can benefit from both worlds without having to choose one over the other.

Combine a great journalistic piece (on print) about unrest in Egypt, for example, accompanied by your iPhone showing the latest images taken by people in-situ (video, audio, pictures) and bingo, you have both immediacy and insightfulness. Your audiovisual content is updateable but your text isn’t.

The value of your content lies not in getting there first, but getting there better.

Add to that, writing this piece on a type of paper that will get all ink-smudged after 20 minutes (waiting for just the right moment to start the clock on its life) and voilà… Who said print was dead?

No, seriously, there’s a world to explore right there.

We truly encourage you to watch the video, the meat starts at 17:00. Thank you Marcelo Soria for calling our attention to it.

Javier gave a conference about iPad design a few months ago in the iPadMadCamp conference. We thought it’d be interesting to recover what we said and share it with those of you out there giving iPad design a shot.

If you want a copy, here’s the PDF.

We’ve been ruminating on this subject for some time now but hadn’t had the time to organize our thoughts and jot them down. The opportunity came a couple of days ago when Mario García, newspaper design guru, asked specialists what they thought a modern newspaper design should look like. You can read what we had to say in García’s original post but the subject is worth expanding on.

In short:

In 1998, former Apple, former Microsoft, now journalist and consultant Linda Stone, coined the term Continuous Partial Attention. This should be the fundamental concept behind online newspaper design, what sets the difference between design that is modern and design that is expired.

Before the immediacy of the web, before feed readers, Facebook and Twitter, it took us 20 to 40 minutes to read a newspaper everyday. Today, we no longer read information in blocks, we scan for it or come by it in snippets. One article here, another one there. By the end of the day we have tailored our own newspaper with information gathered from all sorts of sources: blogs, newspapers, magazines. But it didn’t take us 40 minutes, it took us the entire day. I think there’s something there going on for newspapers if only they had the courage to move forward and forget about their print inheritance.

How can newspapers embrace this? By providing us with a homepage that:

• is easy to read, that is not cluttered or where I have to zig zag between columns.
• is continuously updated, and where updates are visible.
• doesn’t tell me what’s the most important news of the day but gives me the latest and allows me to set my own hierarchy.
• is designed to make information king (not the ads).
• visual, where without having to read much, photos can aid me to know what the story is about.
• can work in my iPad, where I don’t have to zoom in hundreds of times to reach a link.
• can inform me both superficially (online) and in-depth (to read later in my iPad).
• doesn’t organize the news into absurd sections (culture, politics, sports), but classifies it into easy to identify/searchable tags.

We’ll keep touching on this subject in the future. In the meantime, let us know if you think we have left anything out in the comments.

I was watching a conference by Amanda Cox, graphic editor at the NYT, when it suddenly made me think of interaction design (at least when it comes to newspapers) in completely different terms.

Making something, data in this case, more or less interactive is another way for a newspaper of making a point, taking a stance. Interactivity is suddenly seen as an editorial tool (selecting which data to show, how to show it, what amount of detail it should go into). Interaction design has suddenly immense journalistic value: it all comes down to “how can newspapers (their curatorial expertise) help you, reader/citizen, understand this”. In that sense, it’s just as valuable as say, an Op-Ed piece. The purpose, of course, is entirely different.

What do I mean by this: good interaction design (and good narrative story telling at that) turns raw data into enlightening one and so, for a newspaper to put a big effort into making that information not only available but interactive, speaks volumes of the editorial value behind it. It’s not surprising that the NYT has a team of 25 people working on a deadline to accompany important stories.

Would I be stretching it if I said that somehow, interactivity (in data visualization) resembles accountability?

Plus, if you like NYT’s infographics perhaps you’ll like The Guardian’s new data site.

Coming up with a solution for online newspapers is not an easy task and it requires both time and guts. Our advice to Spanish online press is that they have them made a liposuction (as a temporary solution we mean):

Here’s the full picture, with all the fat adhered to the news pieces: