On the design of Newspaper websites...
As has been well reported Scotland has a new newspaper in the shape of the Caledonian Mercury. Its innovation is to be paperless and to only make its content available online. The reasoning behind this is fairly simple – with no massive overheads to spend on print costs they can produce this news portal for a knock-down price. An ambition not to be sniffed at when print papers are feeling the pinch.
There are plenty of other staffers in the blogosphere who will give comment on the content of the Mercury so I`m going to cast my eye over another area – its design. A critique of the design is perhaps unfair at such an early stage in the life of this online organ. Another caveat is that this is just the musing of a bloke in an armchair and should not detract from the impressive effort and drive that it has taken to bring a new Scottish news portal into a reality.
The main issue I have with the design of the site is that it looks and feels like a blog.
As a purveyor of a little read and infrequently maintained blog I do tend to view them as being (happily) a wee bit ramshackle. For me blogs aren't journals of records, whereas newspapers should be.
By far and away the poorest element of the design is the ‘masthead’. A wee image search for the old Caledonian Mercury (a heritage of newspapers in Scotland I simply wasn’t aware of until it was highlighted by the modern incarnation) returns a rather splendid looking mid-19th century front page with an audacious masthead which, like the modern incarnation of the paper, is unashamedly Scottish. However, it’s clear that producing a modern version of this old school masthead really wasn`t an option for the Mercury team as the banner of thistles is pretty much covered by the Scotsman.
As the likes of the Record have claimed the lion rampant the Mercury has chosen to go for a different heraldic symbol of Scotland – the unicorn. This would be fine...except that what they have produced looks dreadful. I`d wager there are still a few folk out there who haven`t twigged that it’s meant to be a unicorn. An additional touch seems to have been incorporated in the low-res unicorn and that’s to make it look like it’s made of mercury...a conceit to far for me.
Another element of the masthead that I’m not convinced by is the typeface. ‘Grand Central’ has been used and its a nice typeface for old signage (as the name suggests it was developed for Grand Central station) but I’m not convinced it works here – the Rs lack authority (and pretentious comments like this should probably discount this critique being taken seriously!). Since it’s a fairly modern endeavor I would have been tempted to go for a condensed clean and simple san serif typeface – perhaps a variation of the popular newsroom typefaces like ‘Bureau Grot’ or ‘Antenna’.
One final thought that should be given to the masthead is to include the .com . This is an online only publication – why not trumpet that? Have a look at the online versions of Le Monde, the Irish Times or El Pais and you will see that even these established old organs are incorporating the URL into their online masthead. The URL is not just the address where you find the paper its also part of its identity.
While there are plenty of examples of online publications that the Mercury could learn from - I`ll direct you to just one fairly good example - the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. Recently revamped it demonstrates fairly well what and online paper could do. I can`t read Dutch but this site is instantly recognisable as a news site. The masthead looks like it belongs to modern times and reflects the domain name. Scroll through it and it’s fairly packed with information – something perhaps the Mercury can`t compete with, understandably, due to scale and the fact that the Mercury is only a week or so old!
Like many news sites De Morgen has video content and podcasts – could the Mercury look to this area? On the spot reporting may not be an option but discussion with the Mercury’s own contributors possibly could be. One final thing to highlight from De Morgen is that if you scroll right to the bottom of the page you have a lovely wee TV guide – something that most all newspapers carry.
The design of the Mercury by comparison looks like a fairly rudimentary wordpress blog. Using wordpress is not in and of itself an issue, it’s a fairly user friendly content management system. Even Number 10 uses it for their site. Perhaps it’s not yet departed far enough away from the standard wordpress models for it not to be too bloggish (I think I may have just invented a word).
The Mercury is looking to compete with the Herald and the Scotsman online but those two established papers (and sites) look more convincing as sources of news (although the Scotsman online is looking increasing ropey these days). Take a look at the English language online Swedish news site ‘The Local’ – it’s in the same boat as the Mercury as being online only but its design, while not fantastic, looks like a serious enough news site and not like a standard blog (like the one you are reading now).
I think one of the reasons that De Morgen and The Local have the edge on the Mercury is that they emulate newspapers more effectively. The top story is always illustrated with a large image to draw you in etc.
I`m no expert in these matters, I’m just a reader of news not a reporter or publisher of it, but if I was to make a few suggestions to improve the look and feel of the Mercury...
Change the Masthead.
Improve the logo.
Drop the use of serif fonts – including for headlines.
Keep the colour scheme simple – drop the multiple colour section bar at the top.
Try and look more like a newspaper – utilise columns.
Explore creating wee podcasts.
Consider the creation of a G24 style output.
Get a mobile site that is designed for smartphones.
Hardly exhaustive and in terms of cost...I`ve not idea. Some of the above may be lovely in theory but expensive in reality.
The Mercury does have a real chance of being a different sort of newspaper but its design should be as authoritative and credible as its output. But given that I've never created an online newspaper and am never likely too the good people of the Mercury are quite entitled to ask “and what the hell do you know?”



