SEEING THE NEWS

NewsDesigner.com is an interesting site, even if newspaper design is not your strong suit or object of fondest desire.

When big news happens, the good folks at newsdesigner quickly mount images of several front pages, showing how it's being handled. Recent examples include the Olympics and Hurricane Frances and, posted earlier this week, Izvestia and a front page that helped get the editor fired (image above).

While newsdesigner.com is a great site for looking at great page design, it's often more than that. Controversial pages, like the one above, and one last week from the New York Times that clearly showed the body of a bomb victim, are featured and discussed.

11:25:27 PM    

THEY KNOW WHAT YOU SEE

Poynter has released a major new Eyetrack study, its third, that tooks a long, hard look at how people interact with Web pages. And, if the future tracks with what happened after previous Eyetrack studies, expect it to start having an impact on the way Web sites are designed.

(Eyetrack research uses a variety of technologies to track the way subjects eyes move as they view, in this case, a Web site. By tracking the eye movements, researchers can determine what it is that attracts, and holds interest. Previous Eyetrack research into how people read newspapers had a significant impact on newspaper design)

Poynter has an extensive site with reports and analysis, and the study has drawn a lot of comment on media-related blogs. Hypergene Media has an interview with Steve Outing, one of the project managers. Outing has a piece of his own at Poynter.

Cyberjournalist.net not only points to the study, but offers some of the highlights of the findings, including:

Homepages

• The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.
• Most people looked at text, not images, first. Dominant headlines -- not photographs -- most often draw the eye first upon entering the page.
• Eyetrack III found that people do typically look beyond the first screen. Their eyes typically scan lower portions of the page seeking something to grab their attention.

...and...

Images

• Larger online images hold the eye longer than smaller images. The bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.
• Clean, clear faces in images attract more eye fixations on homepages.
• People often clicked on photos -- even though on the test pages that got them nowhere (and clicking on photos does nothing on most real news sites).

The entire report is worth reading, particularly if you're interested in design and if you are working on-line in any (professional or personal) capacity. (And, if you're in my On-line Journalism class this semester, expect to spend some classroom time dealing with the findings and what they mean.)

10:17:06 PM    

AND NOW, A MESSAGE...

A slight pause in the media-related stuff for a brief "commercial." I've added two new images to my photo Web site.

8:54:53 PM    

THE ALTERNATIVE VIEW

The Association of Alternative Newsweeklies has launched altweeklines.com, a new web portal that features news and arts reporting from more than 100 alternative weeklies.

The site is packed with reportage from newspapers such as The Village Voice, Cincinnati CityBeat, Boston's Weekly Dig and the East Bay Express. Articles up at the moment cover the gamut from the American presidential race to Beer 101 to The 10 Most Hated Men in Rock (Besides Sting).

One nice touch: there's information with each article on the author, newspaper, date of publication and reprint terms.

Good site. Some great journalism. Bookmark-worthy.

Source: onlinejournalism.com.

6:36:32 PM    

SCIENCE SAYS: USE VERBS

Nicole at A Capital Idea has picked up on some research that backs your instructor's insistence on using verbs in headlines.

She points to a sciencenews.org study from February that found:

...the same part of your brain that orchestrates most of your movement also lights up when you read verbs.

"Remarkably, just the reading of feet-related action words such as dance makes [the motor cortex] move its 'feet,' " said one of the researchers.

And while you're visiting Nicole's site, scroll down to "Headline of the Day" to see why you need to stay alert for double entendres.

6:24:38 PM    

NEWSPAPERS GET SMALL

Here's a trend that may start showing up in a significant way in Canada and the U.S. sometime in the future &mdash the conversion of quality broadsheet newspapers to tabloids (format, not content).

The latest announcement from Europe, according to editorsweblog.com, is that 11 Swedish newspapers will shrink from broadsheet to tab size in early October.

One of those leading the charge to the smaller papers is newspaper design guru Mario Garcia, who is quoted in a piece titled Tabs are Hot, at the Newspaper Association of America website, as saying:

The readers absolutely want them. The trend is there, and this trend is unstoppable. Since 1984, I have never seen a focus group ... where readers were presented with a choice of a broadsheet or a tabloid, which did not prefer the tabloid. Not once.

Tabs are definitely the trend in Europe.

In Europe, Garcia says, his Tampa, Fla.-based design firm Garcia Media is now doing two or three broadsheet-to-tabloid conversions every month. The same October day that the GP finally goes tab, so will Dagens Nyheter of Stockholm and the Sydsvenska Dagbladet of Malmo, Sweden. Tabloids are sweeping Germany. Every big-city daily in Spain is now a tabloid.

Even the hallowed Times of London now prints a tabloid version along with its broadsheet editions. And for good reason: In its first month, Times circulation jumped an average 35,000 on the weekdays it prints a tab version. Going tabloid may have saved The Independent from shuttering. Since becoming the first U.K. paper to offer twin versions of its paper in September, circulation is up 18%.

While tabs may be sweeping Europe, it could be a while before they make major inroads in the U.S. and Canada, where there's still a lot of aversion, at least in industry, to the association between "tabloid" and "tabloid journalism."

12:09:59 AM