Three Ways the Media is Innovating with New Interfaces

Several months ago I had lunch with a major media company executive who told me that, in the future, content will not be subsidized by banner ads splashed liberally on news pages. This is something that the current economic situation is hopefully accelerating as display ad quality plummets to new lows. I remain convinced that the media must innovate their way out of this situation from both editorial and sales, but no one seems to be really doing so on the advertising side.

If you want a glimpse of what's next for media then you need to really look to the editorial side of the house. As we've seen, that's where all the innovation is happening these days - and its changing how we engage with content. Here a look are three promising approaches and their potential implications.

Throwback Interfaces

Most news web sites all pretty much have the same look and feel - the same one they have utilized since 1994. The interface in some ways closely resembles a traditional newspaper. Usually, the most important story is at the top and it carries the largest headline. Other, less important stories, follow. However, that's where the similarities to old media ends.

Some media brands, though, are dabbling in new models that are a throwback to print - and with some success too. Take the Sporting News, for example. The venerable sports daily, which to some degree sits in a commodity market, last summer launched Sporting News Today. The free, opt-in service attracted 75,000 subscribers by the time it launched and probably has a significantly higher circulation today.

Sporting News Today delivers to your inbox either via RSS or email a
beautifully designed virtual newspaper - and on weekends too. The
content is fully searchable and it is supported by full-page ads
similar to what you would see in the print publication. You can also
bookmark and share individual pages. The reading experience is terrific.

Watch for more magazines to try a similar approach and to port this to sophisticated mobile devices like the iPhone or Amazon Kindle.

Hyper-Vertical Navigation

In the old days newspapers and magazines were limited by space in the number of sections they could legitimately offer - e.g. news, sports, business, entertainment, etc. However, that's not true anymore as the Long Tail and infinite space of web allows millions of niches to bloom.

Media companies are recognizing that some readers/viewers want to drill down deep into very specific areas of interest. They are slowly adding topical navigation features or creating APIs that allow independent developers to do so.

The New York Times is among the more notable innovators here. Times Topics classifies and categorizes every single article (even older ones) into thousands of topical pages. Some of these get very specific. For example, you can track a single company- like PepsiCo or GE, two of our clients.Every page has an RSS feed too. Here's the feed for the PepsiCo page.

In addition, through their developer network, the Times offers a rich library of APIs that are spawning all kinds of new creations. The latest is the NYT Explorer (above). This tool not only makes it easy to search the Times archives but then to do so by drilling down further using the same topical taxonomy.

Mobile Apps

Finally, while the web browser remains our primary entryway to digital content, some power users are particularly attracted to applications. This is particularly true among smart phone users. Many media companies are filling the void with own smart phone applications. Variety, for example, just launched an iPhone app powered by Newsgator (below). People magazine will roll out one powered by ScrollMotion later this spring.

As a next step I would expect media holding companies to roll up several of their premiere brands into a single app so that you can say get content from Entertainment Weekly and People via one interface. In addition, I bet they will let you subscribe to RSS feeds as well.

These are some of the editorial and user interface innovations that are on my radar. What's on yours? What have you seen that's novel when it comes to news delivery? So far it seems like the editorial side is way ahead of anything on the advertising front these days. At some point they may catch up. However, if they don't it could spell trouble for ad-supported content.

Comments

[coffee]

the Kindle's main selling point for me is it's text-to-speech feature

[simonbaptist]

Great post. I was late to the game to find out about them (last year at IFRA) but have been really impressed with the News readers being built on the Windows Presentation Foundation, e.g.: http://tr.im/gPUF

[Mark]

Thanks, this is a fun topic.

I love the idea of throwback interfaces. The Sporting News site caused a certain level of nostalgia and thus, emotion, in a way that generic interfaces do not. It will be interesting to see if sites are willing to test styles with a magazine-like frequency.

As far as other trends, I think the idea of visual-based interfaces -- http://silotheme.tumblr.com or http://prototype.nytimes.com/gst/articleSkimmer -- are increasing as a way for people to quickly skim information sources. I've found the information relevancy to be very unbalanced (I go for the nice picture, not the meaningful article) but it's a start.

[ads fuck off]

On the radar: intrusion, covert advertising and degeneracy.

[fuck off ads]

@ads fuck off - not like it's anything new in this field.