OJR opens a new chapter today with a fresh look and even more of the content you’ve come to trust. Not only that, but we’re looking to involve the greater journalism community in the discussion. We are now accepting submissions from reporters and media observers who can offer keen insight into the future of news.

But first, the look. OJR has developed a reputation for thoughtful, in-depth reporting and commentaries on the changing media landscape. That focus remains the cornerstone of our brand. Front and center you will always find one of our signature reports or commentaries, and the latest offering is a perfect example. Geneva Overholser, director of the journalism school at our host institution, USC Annenberg, raises critical questions about the nature of public interest reporting in a time when information is easier than ever to obtain but concerns over privacy threaten to muzzle discourse. Her focus is on the recent spate of government attacks on news organizations for publishing information about gun permit holders following the tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn. Overholser draws on some hard-knock experience as an old-school journalist and editor and weaves in spot-on observations about how open data is changing the business to come up with a compelling argument for openness, as painful as it may be.

The first thing you’ll probably notice that’s different, aside from a new color scheme and masthead, is that conspicuous center column. This is a new department we’re calling The Repeater. Here you will find news and views from other outlets that we think are worth passing along.

Beyond the website, we recently launched a Facebook page. There, and on Twitter, you will find more of the stuff we’re paying attention to that we didn’t have time to include in The Repeater.

With these advances, we will be able to build on our continuing commitment to help our readers understand and contribute to the revolution taking place in news.

And that’s where you come in. Defining online journalism has never been more interesting. Is it about the ever more important role of data? The burgeoning reporting potential of social media? The ever-richer conversation between communities and journalism? The changing role of professionals amid the convergence of news platforms? We want to hear from you. Maybe you have a topic you’d like to see discussed, or maybe you have an article to pitch. Either way, we want to hear from you.

If you have a question, a story idea, or you’re interested in contributing, send your pitch to editor[at]ojr[dot]org. Or feel free to just leave a comment below to share your thoughts about this new direction for OJR.

As a large, vibrant and diverse undergraduate and graduate School of Journalism, USC Annenberg is grappling with all these questions. They play out in our multiple newslabs, they inform our teaching (and learning!), they determine the nature of our research. We will continue to draw on all these experiences with contributions from our faculty, staff and students, and we hope you’ll join us.

The answer to that question might seem obvious, but I warn you that too many news publishers approach this question from the wrong direction – and could be hurting their businesses as a result.

The obvious answer to the website traffic question appears to be… to look at what’s getting the most page views on your site, and to write more articles like those.

Don’t do that.

Why? Chasing traffic by trying to duplicate your most successful content ultimately narrows the focus of your website, as you try to focus on specific topics, features and tone that’s drawn visitors in the past, to the exclusion of other stories and styles. It leaves you (or your staff) feeling cynical, coming to believe that your coverage is being driving by chasing traffic instead of chasing the news. Trying to duplicate past success is reactive instead of proactive – and over the long run that too often leads to a dispirited staff producing formulaic, sterile, mechanical work that runs the risk of turning off readers and advertisers.

So how can traffic data help you to create a more popular website?

Instead of looking at what’s attracting eyeballs, flip your analysis around. Focus not on what’s working, but what isn’t.

Use your traffic data to show you what coverage to dump, and not what to duplicate. Why waste precious reporting and writing time on articles that no one’s reading, no one’s linking to and no one’s engaging with? Stop publishing content that your market’s rejected and use the resources you’d spent creating that to do something else instead.

Be careful when making those cuts, though, to be certain that you’re not eliminating something valuable due to bad analysis of your traffic data. It’s not enough to look at raw page view numbers over a limited time period. Some very valuable articles show few initial impressions, but continue to build traffic to your site over years. It’s worth the staff time to report and create those “evergreen” articles. Other types of articles might suffer due to the time of day that they’re posted on the site. Certain feature pieces that hit your homepage in the early evening due to production habits, only to disappear from the home page before the next morning’s traffic rush might draw more attention if you moved their online publication times to mid-afternoon, for example.

So be sure to take a long view when analyzing traffic data when making decisions about cuts and reassignments on your website. And consider what other factors, in addition to topic popularity, might be influencing unpopular articles and pages on your site. Are the pages consistently hitting the site at an unpopular time of day? Are the headlines not engaging? Could you put a different writer onto that beat who would command more respect, attention and engagement? Should does the audience for content want to see it in a different medium, such as a podcast or video blog instead?

You might not choose to walk away from a content topic altogether, but your focus should remain on the bottom of your traffic analytics. If something’s not hitting with the audience, work to change that. And if changing publication times, formatting or voice isn’t drawing more traffic to an area of the site, don’t be afraid to shift the focus of your reporting to something that your audience finds more important to their everyday lives. (Here’s my piece on the five most important beats for a local news website, to encourage some creative thought on what your beat mix should be.)

Like a gardener pruning the flower beds, cutting away withered elements of your publication can help encourage more growth elsewhere on the website. That’s a healthier way to pursue new traffic than endless trying to clone what’s worked best in the past. And it allows you, or your staff, to remain creative in trying to find new ways to lead your community by showing them fresh news and insight that they didn’t have but will embrace, instead of always feeling like you are reacting to that community, pandering to what was popular in the past.

Traffic data tells you what your community thinks of the work you’ve done on the past. You should respect your audience by paying attention to what they’re trying to tell you. Great news publishers lead – they don’t pander – but you can’t be a leader if no one follows you. Use your traffic data to cut what’s not working on your website, then spend those resources trying to find better ways to connect with your audience instead.

Myth 1: You can’t support a publication on online advertising revenue.

When you hear this line, here’s what the speaker really is saying: “I can’t support my publication on my online advertising revenue.” Just because one manager hasn’t figured it out doesn’t mean that the solution doesn’t exist. If you want to seek foundation support, great. Go for it. But don’t fool yourself for a moment into believing that “non profit” means “no money worries.” Non-profit is a tax status, not a business model. You’ll still need to find sources of income, and in the non-profit world those sources come with many more strings attached than advertising contracts have.

Myth 1 is often followed in the same comment by Myth 1.a: You can’t make money on AdSense. Again, what the speaker is really saying is: “I can’t make money on AdSense.” People who say this typically make the lazy mistake of thinking that AdSense provides incremental revenue each time it displays on a website, so they stick it into every ad slot on the site they can’t sell themselves.

Well, if your local or small-scale advertisers didn’t want to pay to deliver their message on a page, what makes you think that the big industry pros who are placing multi-million-dollar AdWords campaigns want any part of those pages, either? Slapping ads on pages that don’t convert causes Google to cut your payment on pages that do. Adding extra AdSense slots to your site can actually decrease your revenue. The key to AdSense is to limit its deployment to pages that will attract interested readers who will click through to big-dollar advertisers. Never use AdSense as remnant inventory. Use it as a tool to attract ads to pages of interest to national and global advertisers you can’t reach with your local sales staff.

Myth 2: Readers have short attention spans, so you must break up your content.

Readers only appear to have short attention spans because the media revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries have left them bombarded with content options. They must make decisions within split seconds about which content to read or watch and which to ignore.

But once they make the decision to try your content they will stick with it as long as they continue to feel that it’s worth their time. People with short attention spans don’t spend hours without interruption playing Minecraft or Madden. They don’t read 800-page Harry Potter books cover to cover or sit through three-hour Lord of the Rings movies. But all of those were huge hits.

Breaking up content into multiple pages and components simply reminds people at each interruption that they have a choice and could be doing something else. Invest your energy instead into ensuring that your work is relevant and rewarding to your audience. Then craft an awesome lead or visual to grab their attention.

Myth 3: Online journalism = big Flash graphics

Back in the days of shovelware newspaper websites, staffers in the online department had to justify their existence while trying to define to their print-focused bosses just what this Internet thing was good for anyway.

Enter the big Flash graphic. Hey, I had a lot of fun with Flash presentations that turned investigative reports into facile video games, too. But there’s so much more for us to do today. And with poor or nonexistent mobile support limiting the usability of Flash content, I’d question continuing to invest significant resources in Flash development. Perhaps the bigger problem is the attitude illustrated by Myth 3.a: Interactivity = multimedia. No, they are not the same. Interactivity is the inclusion of the audience in the creation of a work. Multimedia is the use of multiple media, including photos, video, audio, text and animation, in a work. That readers must decide what to click on in a big Flash graphic doesn’t make it any more interactive than a Web browser, which also gives readers click choices.

Myth 4: You need a big editorial staff to do great journalism online.

This myth is a favorite of old-media managers who are trying to define away their competition. The market is evolving. Let’s deal with it, instead of trying to pretend that change isn’t happening. Devotion to large staffs explains why so many publications find themselves believing Myth 1, too. Their problem is using old-media models to compete in a new-media space. (Across-the-board cutting isn’t the solution, by the way. Reinvention is.) One-person websites can do great work. They’ve even won Online Journalism Awards in the past.

Myth 5: Paywalls are the best (or only) way to paid content online.

Paywalls work when you offer (a) highly-specialized, unique content of tangible value to people (see Wall Street Journal or Cooks’ Illustrated), or (b) offer enough free passageways through the paywall that the pay scheme becomes a voluntary contribution system (see The New York Times).

Despite how great you think your content to be, if you’re reporting daily news, your site probably doesn’t fall under (a). And if you are not a beloved national brand, you probably won’t make much money from (b), either. If you really want to sell content directly to the reader, do as I’ve been urging for the past two months and look into eBooks, an established market where consumers have shown that they’re willing to pay for content at higher price points than many paywall schemes have offered.

Have fun at the conference. Go ahead and poke the trolls. And, as with any conference, don’t forget to give yourself a daily goal of meeting at least five new people, then talking with each one for at least a couple of minutes. You’ll learn more from those interactions than from listening to any of these old myths.

The Gawker redesign attempts to address the fundamental challenge confronting website publishers: How do you keep your front page fresh to reward frequent visitors, while also featuring your best unique or evergreen content, which will appeal to first-time or infrequent readers?

Get that balance wrong, and you’re leaving money on the table.

While I’ve long encouraged students and beginning Web publishers to launch with whatever open-source or free available blogging tool that makes them comfortable, if you’re going to prosper over the long term in online news publishing, you need to have fine control over your publication’s user interface. Out-of-the-box templates and standard designs aren’t going to allow you the design optimization you need to maximize your income.

Whether you’re making money from advertising, grants, direct payments or a combination of those, you need engaged readers in order to make your site attractive to the people writing you checks. But designing for frequent, repeat visitors often leads you to bury content that could interest a first-time reader. And keeping your best scoops or evergreen content up top could lead repeat visitors to think you’ve got nothing fresh, discouraging them from becoming the loyal and passionate repeat visitors who keep your traffic numbers healthy.

Gawker’s proposed moving what it typically runs as blog posts over into what amounts to a headline feed on the right side of its pages. Clicks in that rail would load content in the main bar. But visitors would see the items that Gawker site editors consider their hottest current scoop or story in the mainbar on their initial page load, even if that were older content.

With this system, big-traffic scoops (such as Deadspin’s recent, uh, expose on pro football player Brett Favre) would remain at the top of the main bar longer for initial views, and not be pushed down (or off) the page by newer, though less popular, content.

The new design also is intended to have more visual appeal, plus more space for video advertising, and to accommodate better a TV-style programming schedule throughout the day. Regardless of how you might feel about the websites’ content, Gawker has found a collection of voices and a format that does resonate with readers, eliciting not just daily visits, but repeat visits throughout the day. Smart publishers need to be watching them.

Will this new design work? Heck if I know. But we need additional attempts at finding new design solutions, so that Web publishers have more real world data to guide them in selecting and creating their own front-page designs.

Currently, Gawker websites are using an overhead rail of thumbnails, linking recently popular stories in a bit of design hack to highlight top recent posts without pushing the latest blog posts down out of the main bar. I can’t wait to see if Gawker’s new design works better than that in promoting both increased page views, and more frequent visits to its websites, by changing the mix of popular and fresh content.

We’ll know by how long this new design lasts, of course.

I’d love to hear from more OJR readers how you’ve addressed this challenge. Or would like to.

What on Earth does this have to do with online journalism?, I hear you ask.

Plenty. For starters, Seurat’s use of pointillism might be considered the intellectual catalyst behind the pixilation that makes all broadcast imagery, including Web pages, possible. Standing in front of this work forces the viewer to consider how countless multiple parts can come together to create a coherent whole.

And isn’t that something a Web designer ought to be doing all the time?

As I look at Seurat’s work, my eyes go first toward the sunlit shoreline in the middle-left of the work. My eye follows the shoreline up and to the right, where it encounters the faces of the couple that dominates the right-hand side of the painting.

My eye tracks down their bodies, noting their lack of facial expression, their ram-rod straight posture. A boutonniere on the gentleman and a flower on the hat of the lady provide the only splashes of color on their attire. She’s holding a leash, upon which is… what is this? A monkey?

Perhaps there is more to this couple than I considered from my initial impression. A running dog, next to the monkey, grabs my attention and draws it toward the casually-dressed smoker, lying next to another couple. The bright sunlight behind them draws my attention up, and the cycle begins again.

I stared at the painting for at least 20 minutes, my eyes cycling around the image again and again, finding new details with each trip around the canvas. This is what great, coherent design should do – to provide each individual element in a way that not only rewards the reader’s attention to that element, but that also then directs the reader to another element on the page, and to do so in a way that creates an ever-continuing cycle, where the reader never feels the need to leave the page.

What do you see when you look at Seurat’s work? When was the last time you stood in front of a great work of art?

Obviously, a website isn’t a painting. We don’t publish just single images, but collections of pages, through which we want people to click, to read and sometimes, to interact by commenting, voting in a survey or creating content of their own. The design functionality of a website demands consideration of many more visual factors than in a single painting.

But great design and visual artistry, whatever the specific format, can inspire anyone charged with creating a website that attracts and retains visitors. As writers need to read great works to refresh and inspire their spirit, designers (who should consider themselves visual artists), must spend time with great art, as well.

Too often, website design begins as the creative work of an inspired individual or small team. But by the time several layers of management have “checked off” on the project, the design’s coherence is lost. The typical newspaper website provides not one, but dozens of potential points of visual entry, with no clear path for the eye, as I found in Seurat’s work.

As a result, the reader is left confused, leading to frustration and the eventual abandonment of the website. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that “pretty” websites are immune from this fate, either. I’ve seen plenty of websites (and paintings, for that matter) that appeared gorgeous at first glance, yet didn’t hold my attention for more than that first moment. Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon” works for me because it offers a visual pathway to keep me engaged with the work. Artistry isn’t the antonym of usability: Great art offers viewers a “way in” to the work. As should your website.

So what’s an online journalist to do?

Individual online journalist/publishers don’t have to face meddling bosses. But most solo publishers I know aren’t designers or artists, either. So they rely on stock templates or themes, which typically provide a more clear point of entry and visual pathway than cluttered newspaper-dot-com sites, but often fail to offer the inspired originality needed to stand out and command a reader’s undivided attention.

For solo publishers, I’ve long recommended getting to know as much as you can make yourself learn about every element of producing your website, from image creation, HTML markup, CMS scripting and server protocols. You don’t need to become an expert in all, but you shouldn’t continue your online publishing career with a rookie’s technical skills, either. Developing some expertise allows you the flexibility to express creativity in your site’s design that others without technical skills cannot express.

But never forget to find time to be inspired. Whether you work alone or in a large organization, seek out places such as art museums, where you can spend time admiring and understanding the visual works of others. If you are part of a large design group, invite those managers “up the chain,” who’ll be making decisions about your work, to join you.

Never cheapen your work by saying “it’s just a website.” Always strive for excellence in what you do, to reward your website visitors the way that “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” continues to reward viewers today. No, you probably won’t achieve that level of excellence, but your work will be better for the attempts.

Postscript: I also enjoyed this painting at the Art Institute of Chicago:

It’s “Woman in Front of a Still Life by Cézanne” by Paul Gauguin. The background of this work is Gauguin’s copy of Cézanne’s “Still Life with Fruit Dish” (which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, according to the note at the Art Institute). Just a reminder that mash-ups are not a new phenomenon, and that artists for generations have been copying others’ efforts to create new works.

But today, I’d like to highlight another frustrating practice by some news organizations – publishing incomplete articles to the mobile version of their websites or smartphone apps.

I’m illustrating two examples here today, but I’ve encountered so many on my iPhone over the past several weeks that I often wonder if many news organizations employ anyone to actually read their mobile publications, or if they merely entrusted their mobile versions and apps to automated processes.

With mobile news attracting a growing audience, news publishers simply can’t afford to take the Ron Popeil approach to their mobile publications – “set it and forget it.” They must devote some eyeballs toward a backread of all that they produce.

Unwatched content online inevitably becomes broken content – whether it be an automatically generated mobile app, a reader-driven forum or columnist’s comments page. Watch your content, and it might still break, but at least someone will catch the problem, allowing for a swift fix.

Earlier this week, I tried to read a story on USA Today’s otherwise delightful iPhone app about a survey questioning Americans about President Obama and his performance to date.

That’s where the story on the iPhone app ended. You couldn’t scroll down to take that “closer look.” The story abruptly ended right there.

Now, here’s how the story looked in a laptop Web browser:

You can see that USA Today had built a table-driven display, featuring an individual representing each of the several categories of respondents that USA Today had identified in its poll.

Now, here was the front page of the travel section on MSNBC’s mobile version last night:

Hey, I love Hawaii! Let’s click and take a look at some of those tips for a cheap trip to Oahu:

Uh…. huh? Yep, that’s it: a head, a deck and a shirttail. No article.

Let’s now fire up the laptop and see how the piece looks in the “normal” version of Safari:

Oh, it’s a photo gallery. It appears that MSNBC hasn’t yet devised a way to transfer content from online photo galleries into mobile pages. Indeed, MSNBC frequently uses this technique for travel articles, especially with tips and “best of” lists, and none of them ever comes up fully on its mobile site.

Neither of these were isolated examples, buried deep within their mobile versions. The USA Today article was on the “top stories” tab of its iPhone app, and the Oahu “non-article” was the lead piece on its Travel section.

Clearly, these omissions represent significant usability failures for these publishers, as well as any others guilty of the same errors. If you can’t port an article over to your mobile version in a useable format, better not to attempt to publish there at all.

But, better yet, news publishers should take the advice that many online journalists have been offering from years – quit encasing your content in a single, specific format. Store it XML, or some other format, that can easily adapt to multiple publishing formats for multiple devices. Then assign someone to look at the product, before or after publication, to ensure that it’s come through properly. If it hasn’t, hold that article until you can fix it. It’s time to show mobile readers some love, and not hope that they’ll remain content with whatever feed your tech crew wrote.

News organization’s desire to create impressive Web graphics and presentations becomes counter-productive when those presentations are not available to mobile users. It doesn’t matter how pretty your design team makes something if the fastest growing segment of your market can never see it.

The gray (screened) type is gone, thank goodness, but it has been replaced by type that, because of the limited way it’s used, produces an even grayer look that extends to the entire layout:

The new typeface is Georgia, a serif version of Verdana, which Microsoft commissioned early on for its online readability. Georgia, which was inspired by Times Roman, is fine, but not when, everywhere, it is uniformly presented in regular font.

“Gutenberg would be proud,” the Times presumptuously brags about its new Web typeface choice. But even Gutenberg used boldface and other typographical devices of contrast in his Bible, the first example of printing with movable type.

To achieve its hyper-cleanness, the redesigned LAT site often eliminates information that would be an important cue to the browsing user. In this strip of three homepage promos (below), the browser is not told that authoritative Hollywood staff writer Claudia Eller was the author of the first promoted piece.

The second promo is for the popular Column One feature, but who’s to know?

High up on the page on Monday, Aug. 17, was this headline:

The linked piece would surely have gotten more hits if browsing users knew it was written by Melissa Healy, the Washington-based Health section writer who specializes in articles on human behavior.

The site’s feature on “our new look” says it “better showcases the world-class journalism our newsroom produces around the clock.”

I wonder if the un-showcased Eller and Healy would agree.

The site has redesigned ads, but it’s not a good idea to format editorial promos in the same size as ads and then juxtapose the two, like here:

Navigation has definitely been improved through dynamic subsection tabbing that changes when the user’s cursor rolls over main headings like LOCAL, NATION, WORLD:

The redesign has earned plaudits from commenting users (“magnificent change! much more readable, and elegant.” “Oooh! Nice, very nice,” “MUCH BETTER”) but there have been dissents too. Stephen wrote on Aug. 12:

“At first glance, i didn’t like it. maybe it will grow on me. maybe what’s ‘under the hood’ is impressive, but the previous design was much more elegant and sophisticated….”

“Our work is not done,” online managing editor Artley and LA Times editor Russ Stanton blog on the site.

Maybe that means they’ll revisit some of work they’ve already done.

A final suggestion: To help users wrap their heads around all the news the LA Times serves up, the site should hire what I would call a “Web maitre d’,” who would, each day, in a one-minute video, summarize what’s featured – from the biggest to the quirkiest stories. Talented would-be presenters – we’re talking LA here – would be lining up at the Times’ Spring Street entrance for auditions. The overview would be delivered with a soupçon of drollery (no Daily Show stuff) – just enough to encourage users to keep coming back for more.

Rather than take a hipshot off those headlines, though, we're going to be proactive on OJR this week, starting with this piece from Eric Ulken, who offers a roadmap for established news organizations to enliven their online efforts.]

In a nondescript training room in the BBC’s White City building in West London, about 80 people are huddled around tables with placards bearing names like “Dr. Who” and “Top Gear” [BBC TV show titles], engaged in discussions on topics ranging from user-generated content to alternate-reality gaming.

The assembled thinkers and tinkerers represent many different arms of the British media behemoth, from radio news to Web production to technology. About the only things they have in common besides an employer are an interest in innovation and an eye to the future.

They’re taking part in the second BeeBCamp, an “unconference” in the tradition of BarCamp (and partly inspired by the Guardian’s GameCamp) that aims to bring together forward-thinking staffers and a few outsiders to talk about themes loosely related to the future of the BBC. [Disclosure: I was one of those outsiders, and, in the everybody-pitches-in spirit of the unconference, I talked about my work in data journalism at the L.A. Times.]

BeeBCamp, according to the BBC blog’s write-up of the event, “is designed as a collective, spontaneous bashing together of ideas, with no set structure to the day.” A whiteboard goes up first thing in the morning, and anybody who has an idea for a discussion or presentation claims a spot on the schedule. For example, one participant wrote: “We own twitter.com/bbc. What should we do with it?” (Some ideas here.)

On the whiteboard with the morning schedule, each show title corresponds to a table. Here’s a shot of the afternoon schedule.

I’m a little late with this post, as it’s been almost a month since the Feb. 18 gathering. There’s already ample coverage of the discussions and presentations (plus tags on Twitter and Flickr), so I won’t rehash all that. Instead I’d like to consider the broader idea of BeeBCamp and similar gatherings as they relate to the need to foster innovation in traditional media organizations. BeeBCamp and events like it are great examples of how “big media” — often seen as bureaucratic and impenetrable — can break down walls, open themselves up and facilitate the development of new ideas.

Why might a media company want to host an event like this? Some reasons:

• Silo-busting: BeeBCamp brings together staffers from disparate parts of a huge institution — folks who might never have a business reason to talk to one another but whose goals and interests mesh, often in unexpected ways. (I got the feeling a number of the BeeBCamp participants had never met before.) The interdisciplinary nature of the gathering is what makes it so useful, as experts apply their unique perspectives and skills to common problems.
• Openness: Everything at BeeBCamp is on the record, unless somebody holds up a sign that says “unbloggable”. This means a lot of what is said will get rebroadcast and commented on by people outside the organization, which is, at the least, a way of showing the world that the BBC is thinking and talking about the future, and at best a way to engage in an informal dialogue with the audience.
• Innovation: Sometimes it’s useful to get away from the desk for a while and talk informally with colleagues. Not the ones you sit next to, but the folks across the building (or across town, or across the country) whom you wouldn’t ordinarily interact with. Crazy, silly ideas flow, which beget less silly ideas, which occasionally lead to completely sane and doable ideas. And because people are free to blog the discussions, there’s a good record of what’s said, which can be a useful starting point for follow-up discussion and action.

BeeBCamp is just one example of how media organizations are opening up the process of innovation. Here are some formats that have been used:

• Hack day: This concept, which originated at Yahoo, typically calls for giving techies (often working in concert with product and content folks) 24 hours to build an idea into a functional prototype. After trying out the format internally in 2005, Yahoo conducted the first open hack day in 2006 and continues to do both internal and public hack days. Matt McAlister, one of the instigators of hack day at Yahoo, is now at the Guardian, which did its own internal hack day (with a few outside guests) last year. McAlister has a round-up of the results, complete with video highlight reel, on his blog. (I’d be interested in hearing if other media have hosted hack days.)
• Meetup: The Chicago Tribune has been making good use of meetups (or tweetups, i.e., meetups organized via Twitter) to engage in informal dialogue with readers. It works like this: The Trib (in the persona of Colonel Tribune) invites local bloggers, twitterers and interested readers of all stripes to meet – no agenda — usually at a local bar. The result: Ideas direct from readers, kudos in the blogosphere and good karma all around. Last year the Trib also invited local bloggers to tour the paper.
• Unconference: BeeBCamp, BarCamp and the recent regional NewsInnovation BarCamps fall into this category. Here’s how you might organize an unconference in your organization: Find interested colleagues. Bring in some clever outsiders. Get them talking about the future and see what happens. Make it clear to people that what’s said is on the record. You want folks to feel free to blog and comment about what they see and hear, for reasons mentioned above.

So, what’s the result of all this interaction? I asked Philip Trippenbach, the BeeBCamp organizer and the BBC’s “serious games” guru, if he had examples of products that have come out of BeeBCamp discussions. His response:

Sorry, but I can’t give you any examples of where this has happened at the BBC — yet.

There is one good concrete idea that came out of BeeBCamp: setting up a BBC-wide innovation database. Prototyping this is trivial, and that’s happening, but the tough thing is going to be overcoming the institutional/bureacuratic hurdles to implementation.

However, this isn’t to say that BeeBCamp has had no impact — far from it. I can’t count the number of interdepartmental contacts and discussions that arose as a result of it. This is the sort of interaction that leads to better cooperation and information-sharing across the company. It’s not to be underestimated. Many, many projects coming out of different departments will be informed by this kind of information-sharing through the company. What’s more, I know of two other events that are being planned in the wake of BeeBCamp, and with the same aim: get more New Media people from across the corp sharing and getting to know each other.

What an event like BeeBCamp and its successors does is wake up the community. It takes a community to raise a child, it takes a community to find a phone, and it takes a vibrant, active, connected community to break new ground in media. That’s what we’re doing with BeeBCamp: stoking the flames, so the embers can forge steel.

If you’ve held events like these to promote innovation in your organization, please share your experience here. And if your company hasn’t started bashing together ideas this way, why not be the catalyst? If the BBC can do it, so can you.

One challenge that faces all of us who have a wealth of content on our Web sites is how to best promote it. Unlike a print magazine or newspaper there is no big stack of paper to provide a clear physical indicator that there is much to read and experience beyond the front page.

Although we can debate the effectiveness of using a Web site’s front page when it comes to promoting content¹, our industry is trying a variety of methods to tackle this challenge. One method is the “carousel” – or a rotating display of a site’s content that appears in a dominant spot on the front of the page.

You can see a variety of carousel styles on sites such as MarthaStewart.com, aol.com, msn.com and even the newly redesigned whitehouse.gov. This past October, the Yahoo! Developer network launched the “carousel control” in their user interface library. They describe it as a widget that provides a means for “browsing among a set of like objects arrayed vertically or horizontally in an overloaded page region.”

So, the obvious question from the DiSEL research consortium was: Do carousels work on news sites?  Also, is there is a preferred design style that is most effective? With the help of page prototypes created by USAToday.com² we put some carousels to the test. Here’s an overview of some of our findings.

What we did

In July of 2008 we tested 54 people with a mean age of 31. About three-fourths of the participants were women and one-fourth were men. Most had some college education.

This study was conducted in conjunction with two others that explored the ideal number of links and images on home pages. (More on these studies in future columns.) Test subjects were solicited via Craigslist, local newspaper sites and blogs. Each participant was given a $20 Target gift card for participating. The entire test took about 40 minutes per participant.

The third test conducted was the carousel test. Users were directed to one of three home pages and asked to “browse the site as you normally would” and to “tell the experimenter when you have seen what you would like of the site.”  If test subjects browsed beyond five minutes, they were asked to stop.

While users browsed the site, we tracked their eye movements using the Tobii eyetracker.  

After the browse time, users completed a questionnaire that assessed their thoughts about the site’s effectiveness and collected demographic information.

Here are the three different home pages viewed, with links to the actual test sites.

Arrow version (Link to test site)

This site’s home page contains an automatically changing carousel that allows the user to control the rotation of the stories by clicking on navigational arrows in the upper right of the carousel element. Seventeen of the 54 people tested saw this version of the carousel.

Dot version (Link to test site)

This site’s home page contains an automatically changing carousel that allows the user to control the rotation of the stories by clicking on navigational dots in the upper left of the carousel element. Nineteen of the 54 people tested saw this version of the carousel.

Thumbnail version (Link to test site)

This site’s home page contains an automatically changing carousel that allows the user to control the rotation of the stories by clicking on thumbnail images to the left of the main image in the carousel element. Eighteen of the 54 people tested saw this version of the carousel.

What we found

To make these results useful to those thinking about carousel use as a promotional tool, we examined the users’ eyetracking and also asked them survey questions to provide us with some of their overall impressions.

Survey says….

As the chart below indicates, we found that the type of carousel used did not seem affect how engaging users found the home page. Interestingly, though, we did see that users who viewed the home page with the Thumbnail version of the carousel, felt more strongly that the Web site was easier to navigate.

Those viewing the Arrows version also had a stronger desire for more stories on the home page. This could be due to the fact that the arrows navigation did not clearly indicated the number of stories available in the carousel.

Another result worth noting is that users viewing the Thumbnail version of the carousel seemed to indicate more than the other two groups that the overall site was easy to navigate.

All three groups were fairly neutral when it came determining which stories were most important.   The carousel style did not seem to provide them with a clear indication of story hierarchy.

In light of that, we also wanted to know how did users would respond to this question:  What was the headline for the main news story on the site?

As the chart above indicates, is seems that users who viewed the Arrow version of the carousel were more apt to say the first story appearing in the carousel was the “main” story. Those with the other two versions were more apt to say that it either all or some of the stories that appeared in the carousel element.

All these survey results – while purely observational – may suggest that editors ask themselves what their goals are with one type of carousel-style presentation over another. Obvious navigation – such as thumbnails – seems to encourage users to view the site navigation as easy. It also may be an indicator to users that all stories within the carousel are of equal importance.

But, this is what users SAID. Let’s take a look at the hotspots to see what they DID.

 Eyetracking shows…

Eyetracking offers researchers valuable information about where users actually look on a site. It is accomplished by calibrating a user’s pupils with a small camera hidden in the base of the computer monitor. Calibration takes only a few seconds, but the tracking results allow researchers to know where users’ eyes went within a centimeter of accuracy. (For more on how eyetracking works, click here.)

We can get a variety of data forms from eyetracking. An aggregate view of what viewers saw is displayed in a “hotspot” or “heatmap” of the Web page studied. The chart to the left details how to read this data.

We generated hotspots for users’ fixations on each version of the carousel. Here are hotspots from the top portions of the page, which seemed to show us the most interesting data about the pages. See the actual hotspots from the pages below.

Past results ring true

As eyetracking researchers, we always will spend some time observing what trends are similar to results we found in past studies. In this case, we found two things worth mentioning:

Top navigation gets the most use.

Past studies have shown that faces in photos are the areas where eyes tend to fixate. From observation during this study (and the heatmaps below) you can see that this is true again. No matter what carousel navigation style was used – and regardless of the size of the photo or the size of the person in the photo – users tended to look for and find that human element to relate to. (Stay tuned: In a future column, we will go results of a study conducted with prototype pages from the DesMoinesRegister.com that experimented with size and quantity of images on a home page.)

We also saw that the carousels that employed top navigation elements (Arrows version and Dots version) got more clicks than the Thumbnail version. Other factors (discussed below) contributed to this observation, but it is interesting we consistently find users viewing and using navigation more if it runs along the top of a page or page element.

Attention to change

One clear observation is that the Dots version had a higher percentage of user fixations on all elements on the top part of the page than the other two versions (Arrows and Thumbnails).

Why? Well, one clear difference here is that the navigational dots changed color when story changed. The change had high color contrast as well – from a blue dot to a white dot. The moving dots seemed to draw attention to the page overall.

The Arrows version had no visible change in when stories changed in the carousel. In the Thumbnail version the box around the image changed when the story changed, but the movement and the change in color contrast was not as marked or clear as the dot changes.

So it seems that the moving navigational dots in the Dots version encouraged a higher percentage of users to view all aspects of the top portion of the page. For example, only about half of the users looked at the page headlines on the arrows and thumbnail pages, but closer to 70 percent looked at this list when the dot navigation existed.

Interestingly, though, even though there was a higher percentage of eyes on the headlines in the Dots version, there were less total clicks in this area of the page than on the other two. In addition there were more “dead” areas – or areas with zero eye fixations – on the tops of the pages with the Arrows version and the Thumbnail version than on the page with the Dots version.

The type of carousel used did not seem to affect the number of clicks on the carousel photo and the corresponding headline and blurb.

These observations seem to suggest that if you are going to use a carousel element it may be best to place navigational elements above the display elements and to utilize a navigational design that clearly indicates the change from one story to the next.

But – what do you think?  Below are the hotspots from each carousel version. We look forward to your thoughts and comments about what you see – and why.   Post your questions here. We’ll respond.

Arrows version 

Automatically changing carousel that allows the user to control the rotation of the stories with navigational arrows in the upper right of the carousel element.

Dots version

Automatically changing carousel that allows the user to control the rotation of the stories with navigational dots in the upper left of the carousel element.

Thumbnails version

Automatically changing carousel that allows the user to control the rotation of the stories with the use of thumbnail images to the left of the main image in the carousel element.

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¹ Some news sites editors have mentioned “off-the-record” that less than 20 percent of their story traffic comes from people linking to pieces from the home page. The rest comes from blog posts, Google searches, Delicious links and other forms of online promotion.

² Many thanks to DiSEL Research Consortium members Josh Hatch and Kristin Novak at USAToday.com for creating the testing materials. Also, thanks to UNC-CH Ph.D. candidate Bart Wojdynski for his assistance with designing this study and running test subjects.

]]> http://www.ojr.org/p1639/feed/ 6 http://www.ojr.org/p1593/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=p1593 http://www.ojr.org/p1593/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 04:29:10 +0000 webtech http://www.ojr.org/?p=1593 In January 2008 a group of interactive producers from news websites gathered at the University of Minnesota for the first Eyetracking Research Consortium, part of the Digital Story Effects Lab project run by Nora Paul and Laura Ruel. Following is the first in a series of articles about findings from the studies conducted for the Consortium members. For more information about the Eyetracking Research Consortium, go to www.disel-project.org

San Jose Mercury News

Some of the eyetracking studies conducted with the consortium members were comparisons of different design approaches or navigational schemes and their impact on user behavior. Other members just asked for feedback from users about their experience on the website. With the eyetracking we could record not just what someone said about what they did on the site, but to actually see what they did.

The San Jose Mercury News wanted to see how their site compared with the Contra Costa Times site – a sister site with a slightly different emphasis on visuals on the home page. They wanted an unstructured study of how people engage with the two sites and then to hear reactions.

Between April 29 and May 1, 2008 fifteen undergraduate journalism and mass communication students were brought in for the eyetracking session. All were between the ages of 19 and 22. All self-identified as being very comfortable with the web. They were set-up with the following scenario: “You are considering moving to northern California for a job and decide to look at two regional news websites. Look at the sites as if you were sitting in your own room. Go where you want to on the site, stay for as long as you would normally. Let us know when you are done.” Half of the participants saw the Contra Costa site first then were sent to the San Jose site, the other half did it in reverse order.

San Jose was also interested in the usability of their calendar function. We asked a few of the participants specifically to go to the Things to Do function and search for particular items: a concert on Friday night, the movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” sushi restaurants. We also asked them to look at the My News / My Blogs function. This video shows one of the participants’ use of those two functions:

Comments / Observations: In the post-exposure discussion about the sites we asked participants if they remembered a “Things To Do” feature. Seventy-two percent did not recall anything like that. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that the features is below the scroll and people didn’t scroll down the page:

Click to see full image

Other times they did scroll but they simply didn’t fixate on it.

Additional studies / observations: Contra Costa and San Jose use a left hand embedded ad style on their story level pages. We looked at all of the stories that were linked to by the participants to see if the left-embed ad was fixated on. Ninety-nine stories were clicked on by participants within the two sites, an average of 6.6 stories per participant or 3,3 stories per site. The most number of stories clicked by one participant was 11, the least was three.

We looked at the information that was available about the stories that were clicked on (headline only, headline and a blurb, headline and photo and blurb, or headline and photo only.) Fifty-nine of the 99 stories clicked on were headline only, with 17% headline / blurb and 21% headline / blurb / photo. (Two were headline / photo links – they were ARA “stories”, essentially advertisements.)

Of the 99 news stories clicked on 63 were stories with the left-embed ad. We looked at the gaze plot for each of these participants and saw that for 23 of the 63 embedded ads was there some level of “fixation” or about 36%. Sixty-four percent of the time embedded ads were ignored. You could see that the people read right around the ad.

We also looked at whether people went to the right rail ads on the page. Only 22% of the story level viewings indicated any looking at the right rail advertising.

By contrast, though, 56% looked at the left rail. In the left rail was the “most viewed / most blogged” listing and a “top classifieds” box. Sixty-nine percent of the viewings of left rail content was for the “most viewed”, 30% looked at both of the content features in the left rail.

Click to see full image

The other content on story level pages is sidebar or related material boxes. Fifty-two of the stories looked at contained sidebar material. When people went to those stories with sidebars, 75% of the time the material was looked at – mostly when there was a box in the upper right with a photo or slide show.

Click to see full image

The participants were interviewed after they went through both of the sites. Following is the transcript of one of the interviews, some of the insights into how young adults use news sites and different features and functions are interesting.

Interviewer: You looked at two websites. The first one was the San Jose Mercury News. Let’s start with that. Was there anything that stood out?

Interviewee: I noticed that there were columns. I paid more attention to the middle column.

Interviewer: Which was?

Interviewee: I don’t know. I think it was headlines. There was a most viewed section too. I think I clicked on something there. I kind of skipped over all the political stuff because I blocked those out. That’s not a good attitude.

And I think there was some kind of moving ad that caught my attention because there were women in it moving and laughing.

The weather at the top was nice.

Interviewer: There are different ways you can navigate the site. So what did you prefer and what did you use?

Interviewee: I just remember clicking the titles of stories in all three columns. But they were kind of up at the top a little bit more. I tend to think of stuff down at the bottom as just like useless. There’s not usually very many links down there.

Interviewer: The second website was the Contra Costa site. And the same question here. What kind of features do you remember?

Interviewee: I remember that the most viewed / most sent was way down at the bottom. And it’s usually like way up at the top. But they had celebrity news. Like where I usually look right in the center column with all the most important, I don’t know, bad celebrity stuff in there which I usually don’t see on anything other than AOL. And I thought that was a little funny. Although I never heard of the Contra Costa before. Is that like a location?

Interviewer: Yep, a city in northern California.

Interviewee: Oh, okay. Well, I thought they were both very jumbled. Both websites were very busy. They had lots of columns. And text wasn’t very large. It was very small. And not a very readable typeface. So I didn’t really like the layout of either one.

I’m used to – I spend a lot of time on like AOL. So they’ve got like a box with images and then text. And it kind of switches, too. I don’t know. That’s not really a news website though. It’s kind of like an entertainment thing. I don’t know. I could have done with a little less pictures, a little more text.

Interviewer: In both of them or-

Interviewee: Mostly in the second one, the Contra Costa.

Interviewer: So which of the two do you prefer?

Interviewee: The first one. The San Jose Times.

Interviewer: Okay. What was in it that-

Interviewee: I don’t know it just seemed more informative. But I saw some of the same stories echo between both websites. So I thought the first one was a little more interesting because by the time I got to the second, the Contra Costa one, I had already seen the story. San Jose Times, I just liked it because it seemed more professional.

Interviewer: In what sense? What made you feel it was more professional?

Interviewee: I guess just the layout. There’s a little less jumble. Like the headlines were larger. I don’t think it buried the stories. And they started with topics that were a little more sober. They didn’t go right off the bat with like – stars. I can’t remember.

I kind of look at – the movies were good. Local news was good. And stuff that affects me, I guess.

Interviewer: Okay. Now there were a few places that you could do things – for example, you had an option to create a section for my news. Did you notice those?

Interviewee: No. I noticed that I could personalize the weather.

Interviewer: The weather is important.

Interviewee: I like the weather.

Interviewer: In which of the news websites was that?

Interviewee: San Jose Times had a weather thing up at the top. No, I didn’t really notice any of the interactive stuff I guess.

Interviewer: Did you notice the photo slideshows?

Interviewee: No, just that one ad with the moving, laughing women.

Interviewer: Which website was that on?

Interviewee: I think it was the first one. The San Jose Times. It was over on the right.

Interviewer: Did you notice the web polls or web vote? You know they ask you questions-

Interviewee: No, I never vote on those. They always try to set you up.

Interviewer: In what way?

Interviewee: Like on AOL it’ll ask you the stupidest questions. Like I spend most of the time on AOL. And every single news story that you view, it’ll have some kind of – I think it’s some kind of trick to get people to interact more with the story. But they’ll have a little question at the bottom like, do you agree? Do you think this is right? It could be like a – like the kid who was like drowning the swimming pool. It would be like, do you think the conditions could have been stricter? And I just get so tired of those things.

Interviewer: Now did you notice a bar with Digg and Delicious and Facebook on it?

Interviewee: No, but I don’t share stories. I don’t email stuff out unless it’s about dogs. ‘Cause my mom really likes dogs. And she’s pretty much the only one I’d send that to.

Even without eyetracking, this kind of session with casual users of the site can give valuable feedback into what works, and what doesn’t, about your site’s design and features.

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