Nice Django/Ellington harmonizing of local breaking news and clean page presentation in the new Knoxville News Sentinel http://knoxnews website design... I especially like the longer story summaries and clearer headlines out front. (Never cared much for the rotating earlier version's image/headlines atop the front page, pretty or not, and I've been picking on the too-short headlines for what seems like years.)

Randy and the other folks at KnoxViews, your independent blogging forum community whatchamacallit, seem to be giving the new look a thumbs up. For me, the main remaining annoyance is the use of animated, scrolling and video ads. Baptist Hospital is a fine place, but I don't think the above-the-fold ad helps its image. I just don't like to have things on my screen scroll, flip or talk withoug asking me first. How about selling the hospital and other advertisers on the community-service idea of "sponsoring" some news in that space?

To balance the focus on hyperlocal news, the sponsored Box could offer a "Today's Biggest Stories" list. I was perhaps too amused by the fact that the time-stamp-order of items featured all three fiery stories for a while Thursday afternoon: thrift store afire, dog afire, Buck Shank no longer afire. But I also noticed how easy it was to push the whole browser window off my screen to the right, hiding the hospital ad.

The sponsorship box could be a set of tabs including the "most mailed" and "most commented" tabs KnoxNews already has on its News page...and a nice little "brought to you by..." credit underneath in bright UT orange.

Back to headlines: Am I the only one who did a double take at the front page headline, "Marshal: New Hope Thrift Stores fire was arson," thinking, "why would a marshal's new hope be that a thrift store fire was arson?"
Strange the things that cross your mind sometime. For more well-thought out discussion of the new design, see Jack Lail's story and attached comments, his blog entry with past-version screen shots, Michael Silence's blog with more reader comments, and Jay Small's background on Scripps site conversions.

It must have been an incredible amount of work getting such a complex site reorganized and republished without missing a day. Between the additional story summaries, comment fields on all the stories, the breaking local-news emphasis, more video, and prominently placed blog and vlog links, knoxnews is hitting most of the current trends in news site design. Shifting a site like that reminds me of some college president's comment that moving a university was as hard as moving a graveyard.

Since I'm moving to a new university, I guess I'll be doing more paying more attention to the Roanoke Times, and BigLickU.com. But I'll wait until I get there and go back to boxing books for now.

2:21:32 AM  #