Philly.com Overhauled...For The Better? (hint: yes)

If there's one case study I continually come back to, it's that of the Philadelphia Inquirer (and Daily News), whose relationship with Philly.com stipulates exactly how the daily newspapers' content is portrayed and dispersed on the Web -- since Philly.com is the front door to their own respective sites.

(According to those who work on the site, the site is managed independently, and the papers have no say in how their content is displayed.)

Well, they've gone through a redesign. It's sexy, it's fun -- but is it newspaper?

(While Owen Wilson tracks through the Inky newsroom shooting "Marley & Me," I'll offer my two cents.)

To answer my original question, sort of. If you go to the Inquirer and the Daily News' direct sites -- they have their own individual styles. The Inquirer's is buttoned up and clean, the Daily News' is more fun -- which is a product of the previous redesign.

But Philly.com has changed, changed, changed -- and now looks like a middling, Web 1.0 magazine.

But that's a good thing. At least for now.

Before this, Philly.com looked almost identical to the Inquirer's site. Since they share content, that made it very, very difficult to figure out exactly where you were at any given moment. Am I reading the newspaper online? Or am I reading Philly.com content?

Why didn't I see this in the paper this morning? (Oh...)

Now, it's clear that each site is distinct, without sacrificing the relationship all three sites have that I imagine boosts traffic. Say what you will about the floating red ball logo, but the new site's got moxie:

The new Philly.com doesn't look like most other news Web sites. It doesn't have an endless collection of text links on the home page. Instead, it's got a clean, elegant design (by the good folks at the Philadelphia office of Avenue A/Razorfish) that highlights important content and is designed to move readers deeper into the site to find more. It makes very strong use of photos and video, in addition to text. It uses photo-illustrations of Philadelphia landmarks at the top of most pages so that there's no question that you're on a site about Philadelphia. In short, the new Philly.com has a strong personality and identity—unlike most newspaper sites, which generally lack local identity.

But those are just the cosmetics. Philly.com also tries to rethink what it is to be a newspaper site. Yes, the excellent content of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News is front and center. But the site is not just about news. It's also full of guidance to living and visiting in the Philadelphia region, including events calendar searches on every page, to help readers find out what's going on around town besides what's in that day's news.

More importantly, Philly.com finally breaks free of being a one-way lecture to the audience. It's bristling with calls to action for reader participation, in comments, discussions, user-submitted reviews, photo and video uploading and other user-generated content. Highlights of that reader content are displayed on just about every page, so that visitors are invited to talk amongst themselves about what's on the site and what's going on around them. I don't think any news site as gone this far in encouraging reader involvement. [Well, you can argue that Philly.com isn't fully a news site the way philly.com/inquirer is...in which case, why have separate pages at all? -- The Ed.] Underlying this is an industrial-strength comment-management system that minimizes the amount of work the staff has to do to police all of this user interaction.

On top of that we've got dozens of reporter and columnist blogs, a growing number of video elements and shows, ubiquitous horizontal navigation to keep readers moving around the site, some cool tools from Aggregate Knowledge to help readers see what others like them are interested in, and much more.

[bolded emphasis added -- The Ed.]

That's taken from the blog of Mark Potts, temporary VP-Editorial for the site (and erstwhile Recovering Journalist). And he's got a lot of valid points -- namely, that the redesigns aren't over, and that's the best news of all.

It suggests that it's not enough in this day and age to design a site and stick to it -- rather, news organizations have perfected the newspaper but are still working on the Website.

I could critique the sites down by specifics -- use of whitespace versus wasted space, picture sizes, architecture and linking schemes, branding and cross-branding -- but I don't think I need to. The site still has a long way to go -- I'd say we're maybe 50 or 60 percent there:

• from a site that simply exudes Philadelphia in a refined way, rather than a touristy way;
• from a site that exudes the Inquirer's staid, authoritative class;
• from a site that exudes the Daily News' fun water-cooler ways (this one's the closest);

...but change comes incrementally, and I'm seeing those changes creep in, some clearly as test mules. Don't forget -- changes are happening behind the desk, too.

Many of the changes that I listed in my last diatribe-cum-wishlist for the Philly.com megasite were answered by Brian Tierney and Co. What that means is that someone's listening.

Here's to progress.

Newspapers Isolate Blogs, Readers

It's a new week here on The Editorialiste, but I'm still catching up to old -- but important -- news on the MSM/citizen journalism front.

One recent tidbit that really struck me was when Gawker's Choire Sicha (Choire, say hi to my old classmate Pareene for me) called out newspapers for sectioning off their blogs as a separate section and then expecting readers to want to read them. He writes in "The New Model: Newspapers Now Stuffed Full Of Blogs, But No Clue Where To Put Them":

"They're organizing by form, not by content. Readers just don't come to a newspaper's website looking for a messy passel of blogs. They come looking for sports, or fashion, no matter what 'form' it's in."

Because of this problem, most blog writers on newspaper sites end up giving their sermons to an empty house, he wrote -- and readers are at a loss for where to find 'em in the first place.

Just last week, I spoke with Philly.com President Eric Grilly, who was kind enough to give me a ring after my recent critique of the site's newest version. We spoke of many things pertaining to the site -- Grilly's all ears when it comes to ideas for the site, and he was kind enough to accept my full-blown, no-holds-barred critique of the site -- and one that I brought up was exactly Sicha's point: that the site sectioned off "Multimedia" and "Blogs" as a separate entity, without any cross-referencing in the sections they pertained to.

In this case, as in many others on newspaper websites, Philly.com readers looking for Eagles content need to go into two completely different sections to read the latest score and then read an Inquirer staffer's thoughts about it.

This reveals a lot about the new media mindset of the old newspapers: that is, the fact that the "blog" is a "hip," "new" asset to add to the web toolbelt, rather than a different publishing platform for similar content. So instead of integrating the blogs into the sections of the site, they're relegated as their own "look at us, we're so totally web 2.0 with our blogs and out multimedia" (which is really just a slideshow that can be applied to any article with photos attached to it).

So listen up, newspapers: Start asking someone who understands what a blog is and isn't for help in integrating them into your sites. You're already slimming your staff down; why would you waste the work of who's left to the big, empty web void?

Rating The Latest Philly Inquirer Redesign

You readers know how dear I hold the Philadelphia Inquirer to my heart, having constructively criticized the paper's online endeavors before on this very blog.

Well this week, my prayers have been answered (including, finally, a blowout win by Mr. Donovan McNabb and his Eagles. But I digress.): The Inquirer has given its wing of the Philly.com estate a facelift.

But is it a success?

Well, I'd say that Brian Tierney and Co. are clearly concerned about their digital face, which is arguably more important than their printed one. But as good as some of the changes are -- and some of them certainly convey the right intention -- the overall result leaves something to be desired.

According to the site, "we added toolbars, flash viewers, more video and multimedia,most viewed, most emailed, and top story boxes" among others. All of this makes sense -- in terms of navigation, it's much easier to read the pulse of the day's news as well as what the rest of the city is reading (not to mention much more opportunity for the business desk to reap data from its readers).

Visually, the masthead is placed in much more prominence, with a smaller philly.com logo above it. However, a major navigation problem -- since the new layout preserves the philly.com layout, clicking "Home," "News," "Sports," "Living" and other tabs puts you right back into the philly.com-logo'd site, and not the "Inquirer" sections. Sure, the content is all the Inquirer's -- no use to double-report, naturally -- but the Inquirer masthead is lost into oblivion on all of the more breaking/online exclusive stories.

So how exactly is the Inquirer supposed to show that it's actually the one responsible for providing you, the reader, with content? The little "For the Inquirer" byline on each article in 50% grayscale?

To boot, mousing over the "Inquirer" tab brings up all the subsections of the actual paper, which are effectively mirrors of the Philly.com tabs. Not only do they look redundant, but they're actually out-of-date, too. As it turns out, the content under the "Inquirer" tab is what ran in that day's paper -- but there's nothing that would tell you that except the outdated timestamp. So if I wanted to find up-to-date coverage on the aforementioned Eagles-Redskins game, I'd have to use Philly.com's Sports tab, and not the Inquirer's own Sports tab -- even though the content is coming from the same source.

As for the front page, things are a little better. Some nice changes include including breaking news and a better front-page layout, with larger images and more selection of stories -- it now looks like the Inquirer publishes more than three stories a day. If you scroll to the bottom, there's a nice tabbed and featured-story layout, but more redundancy takes up valuable space. Why the doubled-up listings? And what's the tabbed box below the fold for?

One worry about the whole thing: I hear nearly every day that news studies show that a website loses 50 percent of its readers every "scroll" they must perform. On my high-resolution, small-font screen, it took me five scrolls to get to the bottom. Sp let me ask this: How many readers do you expect, honestly, at 800 by 600 pixels resolution, to get down to the pretty section-by-section breakdown at the bottom?

As you can see, there are some major unanswered problems in the Inquirer's redesign. For one, the front page gives up too much top and right-hand space to advertisements and doesn't distribute them better (and I'm looking at this in 1280 x 800 resolution, too, so "above the fold" is a lot of screen). Second, there's a major fight for attention: While the Philly.com masthead no longer dominates, it now fights for the reader's eyes with the Inquirer's venerable masthead -- even when the content is all Inquirer. As a reader, that means I don't know where to go for the news I want -- and also gives me far too many redundant options to get lost in. Once I'm lost, I can't find how to get back because the Inquirer masthead has disappeared.

So please, Brian Tierney, listen up: You and the boys are doing a great job (well, except for that whole headquarters mixup), but you're only halfway there. Keep pushing -- and call me.