As a committed technophile, I frequently find myself defending the web to my charmingly contrary literary friends. While I’m pretty sure it’s done nothing to help my chances at a bar, as soon as someone romanticises the printed book or the ‘weekend ritual of the coffee and the newspaper’, I, in an almost knee-jerk fashion, trumpet the superiority of the internet in response. It’s deliberately polemic and probably a little silly, but is also sorta’ necessary when most of your friends are arty luddites.
But the incessant recent buzz about the newspaper has gotten me thinking, and my passionately nerdy defences have run into a rather sticky problem. Despite the fact that we are well into the ‘next revolution in news’, every time I stumble across an actual copy of, say, the Globe and Mail, it seems that physical newspapers still have significant advantages over their online counterparts.
Now, I’m not saying that “newsprint is just, like, more real, man”. When reading a newspaper story, I cannot do any of the following things: cut and paste; look up historical events or the meanings of words to clarify a story; email a piece, either to myself or a friend; and I can’t search without spending ten or fifteen minutes flipping through the damn thing. So, I don’t mean to overstate the usability of newsprint purely for the sake of nostalgia or familiarity.
But if one is to think of the experience of actually using your average, multi-section daily, there are some distinct benefits. For instance, after picking up the bundle of newsprint that just thudded at my front door I can, quite quickly, read the headlines on the front page and see the important stories inside I want to read. Similarly, after flipping through the stack of sections, I can then very quickly see which of the ‘speciality’ pieces I wish to peruse. All of this can be accomplished in about 30 seconds.
Can I do this on a newspaper website? Sure. Can I do it as quickly and effectively, scanning the main stories in around half a minute? Nope. Rather, I have to dig through the tree structure of a website to get where I want: if I want to read John Doyle’s lovely TV columns, I have to first go to the Globe’s site, then click on ‘Arts’, then go to ‘Television’ and then find the columnist I’m looking for. Similarly, I often have to rely on food blog Taste T.O. (which is great, btw) to link to culinary stories that seem almost hidden on newspaper website. All of this is to say nothing of the simple fact that, in a physical newspaper, you often stumble across pieces simply by flipping the page. That is something you just can’t do on a web page (though I suppose Stumbleupon comes closest).
But beyond the ease of reading both what you wanted to and what you didn’t expect to, the aesthetics of a newspaper layout are just easier to peruse and scan than a single story on a flickering screen – that, despite the myriad benefits of online news, it has yet to surpass printed news for sheer usability. Perhaps for this reason, both the New York Times and a site called JPZenger have recently released experimental sites that use a new approach or interface for reading news. Take a look at them; they abandon the newspaper website for something designed to skim in the limited space of a computer monitor. My point in all this is that it seems at a certain point, technical usability – search, social media etc. – has thus far trumped readability, and this is something that needs to change.
The NTY experiment seems like the best I’ve seen so far. You can scroll through and get a sense of what you want to see quite quickly. It’s effective and a definite step in the right direction. Interestingly, its interface uses animation, something that is specific to the screen. That, I think, is key: acknowledging the aesthetic and technical frame of news and then tailoring the experience to replicate the best parts of a physical newspaper, while doing away with its analogus clunkiness. What it is perhaps missing is a unified standard, whether on the web or an a mobile device like the Kindle, the primary purpose of which, might be reading newspapers and magazines.
