The Las Vegas Sun recently launched a new Web site and I have a few criticisms. Overall, I think every paper in the country should find a way to emulate what the Sun is doing in terms of markup and general site design. I question a few other tactics.

The Good

Light use of photos and graphics makes the main graphics pop out and the page load extremely fast. Kudos.

The Sun has the most elegant markup I’ve seen on any current newspaper Web sites. With no inline styles, the table-less design will make re-skinning the site a snap down the road, should they feel the need to update. Separating content from format will save them months.

Item’s that need to be presented big are presented big, rather than simply on top. I love that the editorial picks share space above the fold with the constantly updated blogs that feed news throughout the day.

The Hi Def video looks beautiful. It’s well presented on both the homepage and the multimedia page. That you may download many videos in popular formats or embed them in your site is a step in the right direction.

The search! Simple yet powerful date span search aids in honing down keywords. Keywords are great for Google searches but news searchers generally seek specific items.

Human-readable URLs!

iCal exportable calendar!

The Bad

No ads? I love it, personally. But what a horrible business model! As of now, there seems to be no monetization strategy. That’s really bad news if you’re pushing video, let alone Hi Def video. Obviously an ad strategy will come, though I wonder how they came to the decision to roll out new site before building in ads. Seems silly to lose the revenue for no apparently good reason.

Feeds only exist for main sections, blogs and general comments throughout the site. But doesn’t some of that content overlap? I think we, as an industry, should be moving toward ever more granular feeds. As far as I can tell there aren’t any tags on news items. I’d like to subscribe to news, calendar events and blogs that only mention, say, McCarran airport.

The feeds are also partial text. Yuck.

Commenting requires registration. While a lot of anonymous comments amount to crap that must be moderated, a lot of good discussion comes from anonymous comments, too. I think the trade-off is worth it.

The Hi Def video sets you apart as far as a craft news goes, but what about commodity news? What about constantly feeding your site with brief video updates? Maybe the bloggers eventually do that, but I don’t see a site surviving on well produced Hi Def video alone. Not yet. Though, I really don’t know the Las Vegas broadband market well enough to comment. I do think the current strategy, while beautifully executed, feels old media. It lacks serious disruption against other competitors in the video arena.

The site, as of now, relies heavily on story-centric items. I’d like to see a solid push for database items. (For a start: There’s a LOT of money in Vegas, where is it all going?)

Update: Yoni Greenbaum just emailed this to me:

It looks like the lack of ads is the results of the JOA which has Las Vegas Review-Journal handling the advertising, circulation, production and marketing functions of the Sun, but having no involvement in the Sun’s website. In addition, the terms of the JOA “guarantees a second newspaper voice in the community”, so maybe online revenue is not a concern.

You can find the first part of this series here. In it, we looked at what convergence really is. It is a synergy of previous media. It is how we interact with the web, either overtly through IM, email, polls, and blog comments, or implied through our usage of the Web’s technologies.

We can use the Web how we see fit. This is the key difference between the traditional (old) media and online (new) media. The technologies that combine to create the Web give the end-user as much control over the Web’s outcome as the original creator of a Web page.

Wait, what?

Think about it. New media bloggers, like those at Media 2.0 workgroup and Cluetrain fanatics, like to talk about the Web as a conversation. The Web ebbs and flows in reaction to itself. Since the we are the Web (loosely speaking the Web is a network of people as much as a network of computers), we create and build the Web every day, through our personal blogs, our Amazon wish lists, our craigslist listings and our email forwards.

The Web is full of conversations. Conversations from corporations to clients, from retailers to customers, friends to friends, bloggers to like-minded readers and insane people to anyone who will listen.

I remember watching Larry King a while back. He was talking to Rosanne Barr about the Internet. It was painful to watch. King said he wouldn’t like it, there’s “80 billion things on there.” And surprisingly, Barr hit the nail on the head. You can watch the video here.

She doesn’t know she’s talking about filters, per se, but she’s describing the single most important idea on the Web. The internet is noise. Constant noise. The ebb and flow of the Web means that it is constantly changing. And growing. If any single person tried to keep up with everything on the Web, they’d explode. Thank god smart people built robots to crawl the web, to give us the ability to search for whatever we wish. Thanks Google.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there.” King is right. But there’s also lots on books in a library. That’s why libraries are organized so that one person can dig out information relevant to their search.

The problem with libraries, though, is that we can’t easily add meta-data to the books we find in a library. All the information in a card catalog is meticulously entered by a librarian, god bless ‘em. However, that information is not extensible. We cannot add to the catalog.

Scarcity necessitates top-down control

Let’s step back and think about how we interact with “old” media.

Television, as I stated before, is locked into time. So is radio. There are only 24 hours in a day so a select few people decide what goes on air, much like librarians decide how to create filters for library catalogs. A librarian is a curator of filters, and an editor is a curator of content. But in doing their jobs, they both act as filters, leaving the the final users of the products out of the process.

And then step back even further to the technology that makes TV work. Previously, there were only a few stations over the air. Those stations are still the only few that exist on the air waves. Spectrum is a form of space, so the government had to allocate that spectrum to certain groups.

The same goes for newspapers and magazines and books, which cannot feasibly produce 80 billion page volumes every day. Economics and usefulness outweigh the value of near infinite texts. Scarcity necessitates top-down control. Someone has to make a decision as to what stays and what goes. Someone must curate.

But the Web is so insanely different it doesn’t need top-down control. The reason it doesn’t need editors or librarians is, surprisingly, because there is so much stuff. We curate our own corner of the world and we tailor it to our sensibilities.

The cost of creating a Web page is fast approaching zero. Unlike paper, it isn’t trapped in spatial dimensions. You can have one giant page full of content or a billion pages with sparse content, it doesn’t matter. The device you use to access the internet doesn’t have to also grow in size because the amount of content is growing.

Content is separate from form.

What a concept.

Infinite content

I’m reminded of a Saturday Night Live skit. Watch it here. It’s fake commercial for a bank that bought the last Web domain available: clownpenis.fart.

It’s funny because people, when using the Web, don’t seem to give a shit what the name of a site is. They’re looking for content. They’re looking for usefulness. Brand isn’t a name anymore. Brand is interface. Flickr is a dumb name. So is Twitter. So is Google. But we’re not looking for a name. We’re looking for usefulness. We’re looking for content. We’re looking for what we want.

When we search, or click on a tag link, or drill down into a site, we’re looking for something that we want, that may be something general or something specific, but we want content and we want it now. We don’t want a name. If we don’t find something closely resembling what we’re looking for, we leave the page and try somewhere else.

The key for newspaper sites is simple. Make it easy for people to scan your pages. Make it easy to search for content. Don’t tell them what to look for. Help them find whatever it is they want.

If you don’t have it, or you make it hard to find, they will leave. We will leave. We’re not loyal customers anymore. Too bad, so sad. Deal with it. This is the main foundation for my argument for putting more “crap” on the Web.

Content everywhere

The Web is tearing down some ideals that existed in the past regarding ownership. The Web is a connection between people. A youtube video can appear somewhere other than youtube, which changes the videos context. RSS makes it hard to control where your content ends up. Hell, it could end up here. Or it could end up in my gmail account, my facebook profile and elsewhere as I’ve described here. Because we’re all curating our own corners of the Web, we’re getting flack from groups like RIAA, MPAA and overzealous editors who don’t see the value of their newspaper content anywhere else on the Web but their own Web sites.

Because content is separate from form, we can distribute it everywhere. I believe wholeheartedly, that distribution extends reach and increases content longevity.

Recently in our newsroom, we received an email from a professional photographer from the Twin Cities. He had taken a whole bunch of photos in a small town that was devastated by a massive tornado. They were great photos. Amazing photos. And he was giving them to us. All he wanted was credit and a link to his Flickr page.

This caused a stir that I hadn’t dealt with before. Why would this guy give away his great photos, members of the newsroom asked. Why wouldn’t he? It’s the Web. The guy makes his living from taking pictures (of weddings and such), not reselling his photos that were licensed under Creative Commons. The photographer wanted to use our site(s) to extend his reach. To get his name out there as a photographer. The photos are secondary to his ability to take them well.

And that’s exactly what newspapers need to do. Get your content in places where people will discover it. Think beyond your Web sites. You can’t expect thousands of people to just happen across clownpenis.fart on their own. You have to put yourself out there. Let your users stick your content in every nook and cranny on the Web. And then, once you’ve increased your market share, figure out how to profit off it. But we’ll talk more about distribution later.

What to make of this

The key points to take home here:

• Users want what they want, not necessarily what you have
• If what users want is not easily discoverable, they will get discover it somewhere else
• Many users want to do as they wish with your site, forcing them do anything else will only turn them away
• One way to achieve discoverablity is through distribution

Search is so important for newspaper sites. A newspaper.com is loaded with content, content that goes back years, if not decades. Hiding that from your users does nothing to help you. Give your users familiar tools to discover new content, and related content. You also can’t lay it all out there and expect them to know where it is.

Otherwise, expect them to leave as they (and the rest of the Web) get more sophisticated.

I’m often blown away by how outdated journalism awards are when it comes to the Web. The descriptions read like they haven’t been touched since 1999: They make reference to download times and layout, when those things are secondary to experience. There’s rarely talk about interface–meaning how you interact with the page. These awards, unfortunately, are geared towards thinking about the Web like you’d think about a newspaper. This is a sad byproduct of thinking of the Web as an extension of the print product (as a place to put things that can’t exist in print like audio and video), rather than thinking of it as a wholly new and largely separate product.

Without naming names, I’ve had the misfortune of trying to select special Web projects for these contests where the judges seem to simply look for a pages within your site that look different than the rest of your pages. It’s a process that’s extremely annoying. The content itself rarely seems to matter. Interface means nothing in these contests.

So, I’d like to talk about some things that may seem obvious–at least to many of us. I’d like to talk about what really makes the Web sing. This is the first of a multiple part series.

Information architecture

Broadcast. There are only 24 hours in a day. News, or rather, information can be made available as soon as a live truck can broadcast from a scene or an anchor can say a few words on air. But the information is fleeting because the medium is damned to time. The viewer must be watching at the moment the information becomes released or it is lost.

This is one reason, aside from the cost of producing news, why 24 hour news doesn’t fill it’s day with wholly new information every second of the day. Video, sound and information must be archived, selected and brought back to the surface periodically to cast a wide net on the audience. Broadcasters understand that people aren’t tuned in all the time, so they shoot for peak viewership. In a given 24-hour cycle, there’s hardly 24 hours of new information.

Throughout a day, information ebbs and flows and changes. It never feels complete, because with speed comes inaccuracy (or at the very least, incomplete information). It’s all regurgitated until someone in an office decides we’ve had enough or something new comes along.

Without sounding too much like Steven Hawking, time and space are the same thing to broadcasters.

Which brings me to print. Newspapers and magazines are far more doomed to time than broadcasters. Where broadcast has flexibility of seconds, newspapers must make decisions within hours of press time (and often, magazines must lock their pages months in advance). Print journalists spend their days gathering as much information as they can fit into a page and then, at press time, release it into the world. This is why when you pick up a newspaper or a magazine, it feels outdated compared to television or radio, yet it feels much, much more complete.

While print media gives the illusion of spending more time gathering news, it still has the absurd problem and blessing of physical space. You can only put so much information on a page and make it useful for readers.

Here’s the problem: Putting words and images on physical space makes it difficult for a media consumer to get news quickly. Where broadcasters flourish in time-sensitive or crisis news, print media struggles.

Here’s the blessing: Unlike broadcast, where the viewer is doomed to watch whatever information is available at the moment they’re watching, print readers can scan the headlines and select the news they wish to read, at a time of their choosing.

The great thing about magazines is that there’s a permanent record. You can start your own personal archive of each issue. (You can do this with newspapers, too, but you’ll look like a crazy person after a week or two of papers, without the aid of microfiche. The same goes if you tape 24 hour news). The not-so-great thing about this is you’d have to have the patience of a librarian to index, catalog and sort all the information held within those pages.

So to refresh:

• Broadcasts overlying advantage is speed, but with that advantage, it locks its audience into predetermined time slots. The viewer must be in sync with the time the content airs.
• Print gives audience the advantage to escape predetermination, but cannot offer speed of information that broadcast affords.The content therein can be read separately from the order it has been delivered (read sports first, if you wish). It is asynchronous.
• Both media are difficult for the end user to organize, to keep a record of all the information contained within. They are not extensible. You can’t inject meta data into the media, without the aid of another medium (i.e. a card catalog).

And to add a few quick thoughts:

• DVRs like Tivo have exploded the first point that broadcast be locked into time…for the end user. The content creators still only have a set amount of time to work with in a day. Television broadcasters are still primarily geared towards casual viewers, not those recording television. Furthermore, the act of recording live news defeats the advantage of speed somewhat.
• Print offers portability to readers, but portability is hardly exclusive to print. Now, you can buy portable televisions and access the Web from a variety of mobile devices. Note the word device, however, the newspaper is as much content as it is also device. I’ll delve into this more shortly.

Words on convergence

When I was in college, and still even today, the word “convergence” flies around newsrooms and J-schools. 99% of the people I’ve met who’ve exerted the breath to describe the meaning of convergence take the line that it is a convergence of content: Audio, video, text, pictures and interactive elements can coexist on a Web page. While that’s certainly true, I think we’re missing the point. Your Website should not be thought of as an extension of your broadcast or paper product. It is a wholly new product. It just happens to make good business sense that the content overlaps.

Convergence is a synergy of the advantages I’ve explained above. The Web is asynchronous and it is fast. You can deliver content quickly and your audience can peruse at their leisure. But there is so much more. Because a Web site is a singular element, as opposed to a moment in time (broadcast) or a periodical device (print), past news can be archived and retrieved easily.

That’s the beauty of hypertext. You can link to anything that exists on the Web, including your own content.

What does this mean?

It means newspapers and broadcasters need to take advantage of this synergy on the Web. A newspaper.com should not be mostly a digital version of your print product. It should be a new product.

We’re starting to see a lot of newspapers take on a Web-first mentality towards news; Breaking it as it happens throughout the day. This is good for newspapers, since they’re taking on their broadcast rivals territory. Broadcasters need to step up their game, too. They need to figure out how to use the Web to break out of the time-sync rut. And everybody needs to figure out the mobility of content.

What’s next?

I’d say stay tuned, but that phrase is fast becoming outdated. Check back whenever you’d like, I suppose.

• In the next installment of this series, I’ll take ask you to take a hard look at interface. How can we take advantage of convergence? And what are the pitfalls?
• After that, I’m going to talk much more about extensibility and the rise of serendipity on the Web.
• Lastly, we’ll look at the Web as a distributor. We’re all cyborgs.