Entertain me, news monkey

As fickle as I am, I'm terribly laid back. However, lately I've been starting to sit up a little more. I've been content with the way news web sites have been laid out for years. After all, why expect anything different? That's how they've always been, that's how they will be, so what's the big deal? The "big deal" is that news sites seem content to be among the worst-designed sites in Internet existence to-date. The more I think about this, the more I'm not fine with this happening. I'm not okay with it, because the Internet, thought to be the newspaper killer, will be killed itself by the next new medium unless it forces a change upon itself.

The death of newspapers, exaggerated though it may be, has become a great example for contemporary forward-thinking journalists to see how a lack of innovation breeds contempt, and if you want a product people want, you need a product that people will want. (Shocking, isn't it? Despite reporting on the entire world, sometimes the journalism world doesn't quite grasp how people work.) Television has been fortunate enough to have the unfortunate problem of needing constant innovation to hold on to people's attention spans. Over the past few decades, the entire news lineup has changed, from Block A being US/Intl, Block B being local, to now leading with local for both blocks and using outside stories when absolutely warranted.

The popular Internet, though, is still a little bit new. For me, personally, "the Internet" really started in full force after Matt Drudge posted a canned Newsweek piece by Michael Isikoff outlining an affair then-President Clinton had with a intern. That was 1998. This is 2009. So if the popular Internet is 11 years old, how much can we know about life cycles and how often we need to change things up to keep people interested?

So far, we don't know. Not quite. With the Internet ever evolving, thanks in part to blogs and social media networks, the life cycle of the Internet can be hypothesized, but has yet to be concretely proven. We know it moves fast. Real fast. A web site needs to be re-designed every 1-2 years to keep from getting stale, we know that. (A concept that The Drudge Report has never listened to, and insists on providing its tabloid links in the most 1992-way possible.)

We know the Internet evolves, and that news needs to change, you are thinking. But what does this have to do with news on the web dying? What it means is that over the past few years, news sites have not changed that much. Look at industry leader CNN.com, for example, in the year 2000. The layout, the boxes, the labels, everything looks like a template that could and probably is being used today. Is that, in itself, a bad thing? No... However, if you look at news web sites in multiple markets (like I do), there's not a whole lot of difference. In content, in layout, and not a whole lot of difference between the year 2000 and now. The corners are cleaner, there's the ability to comment on stories. Has the medium fundamentally changed? I'd argue that it hasn't.

And yet, we use the news on the Internet. Because it is the best medium we have... for now. Until it becomes obsolete and irrelevant, like radio, or at least, half as relevant as it once was, like newspapers. Is there hope? I'm not sure. All the creative types have fled the "regular" web to work on applications for mobile devices. There is some true innovation in how news is displayed on these challenging pocket devices. But on a larger canvas, like a 800x600 monitor? Innovation has long stalled.

I've long lamented that most newspaper front pages look the same. More editors are concerned with cookie-cutter designs that their copy editors can quickly throw together, rather than creating a display that is actually engaging and interesting. Newspaper design has become a science, rather than an art. Same thing, I fear, is happening to the web. If Newseum were to archive the front pages of all news web pages, I'm sure we would easily see how similar they are all to each other as well. It would be easier to see how the cookie cutter has started to destroy the innovation, the displays that the Internet can so easily provide.

This may make me a cranky, hypocritical curmudgeon, but I'll still continue to go to news web sites, if only because they are a fast and efficient method. The difference between them and the rest of the web is, I like visiting other web sites, I feel a need to visit news sites. I'm looking forward to a day when the innovators come back to the main Internet and put their heads together to create a new system of disseminating news. To paraphrase the Black Eyed Peas (see? There's some keyword search optimization going on there.), sites like Facebook and Twitter are so 3008, news web sites are so 2000 and late.

--- If you happen to see a visually compelling news web site, one that isn't a cookie-cutter of an existing web page (or decade), please let me know, either in the comments, or Twitter me a mention: @charlesjurries. Thanks.