Some ill-considered thoughts about The Texas Tribune
The much-anticipated launch of The Texas Tribune took place Tuesday, and I thought I'd scribble down a few thoughts about the site. I know it's hardly fair to critique an enterprise that is merely hours old. And as of yesterday morning, they were clearly still working out some bugs... doh!
But this is the internet era, after all. And if the web is tailor made for anything it's precisely this sort of half-baked, half-thought-through, ill-considered commentary written by someone who has no real expertise per se, but plenty opinions. Welcome to the web Texas Tribune!
I'll come back to the content in another post, after spending more time with the site. But today I wanted to focus on the first impressions: The concept, and the design.
* Concept: The Big Idea is great. A nonprofit site doing serious journalism "to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern." It's a big Big Idea, but in Evan Smith, who was editor of Texas Monthly, they have someone who has the juice and experience to make that happen. They also have an impressive lineup of reporters, technologists and multimedia folks to translate the vision into something tangible.
Like many of the journo nonprofits cropping up these days, the Tribune will distribute its work through its own website and via "distribution partners." That's not only smart, it's necessary. Building a brand and destination website from scratch is tricky business (just ask Geoff Dougherty) so getting your name out there in as many outlets as possible is a very good idea. Where the Tribune goes that others have not is the idea that the organization can provide a platform for civic engagement through its "on-the-record, open-to-the-public events."
Interesting idea, and somewhat reminiscent of the civic journalism movement that captured the imagination of so many academics (and so few journalists) during the 1990s. I wasn't a fan then, but for an organization like the Tribune this might make some sense. The notion that public-interest journalism should be about solving problems -- or at least acting as a conduit for dialog between the public and The Man -- isn't such a bad idea, particularly now that the web offers so many cheap and easy tools to facilitate such a dialog.
The problem the Tribune faces is the same problem all of these journalism startups face: They are new, small and, at least initially, won't have the cache of other, more established media organizations. That means they will be easier for the afflicted and the comfortable to ignore. But, perhaps, this is where the partnerships come into play. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with.
* Design: Real designers I know (read: people who actually know what they are talking about) may disagree, but I'll be blunt: I. Love. This. Site.
Love it!
I'm super glad they didn't overthink this, and they so easily could have. Having done this web thing now for a couple of years, I have an ever-growing appreciation for simple, clean design. Simple is hard -- harder than hard. Hard to do well, and the Tribune does it very, very well. Kudos to the technology and design team for not trying to "innovate" where tried-and-true design patterns will do nicely, thank you very much.
The Tribune has a very traditional, very newsy look and feel: Three columns, feature position upper left, three promo slots along the top of the page, three smaller feature slots adjacent to the center well, a sea of headlines/links below that. Good! The headlines are big, bold and black. They contrast nicely with the sans-serif body text. Also good! (Are you listening L.A. Times?) I especially like the limited color palette, which makes the right things pop.
The Texas Tribune is the latest site to embrace the big, black horizontal navigation bar, and I think it may be the best of the bunch. Sub-navigation, for example, is very tricky business, but by adding just a hint a color to the navigation bar, it clearly indicates to the reader that there's more to see.
The best design on the web is one that doesn't surprise or confuse your readers. When attention spans are measured in nanoseconds, all other considerations are secondary. Predictable is good, and the design staff obviously kept that firmly in mind. Nicely done.
A few quibbles:
One suggestion would be to keep the story synopses to a single sentence, or two at most if it's in the feature position. Headlines need to be descriptive and punchy. "A brief history of fratricide," for example, is clever. But the way-too-long synopsis gives readers (at least this one) no clue really what the story was about until the last sentence.
All you really need, actually, is that last sentence: "Party faithful want to stay above the fray: Primary challenges to longstanding incumbents tend to get rough quick." I would read that story.
The organization and order of the entire center position and secondary feature positions confuses me. I get the idea: rotate those four stories through the center well randomly, and give people something fresh to see each time they come back.
The trouble is, not all four of those stories (at least as I am looking at the site today) are worthy of the center well. One is a day old, and presented completely out of context from the story that it, presumably, is following. There's no "related" link. No graphical treatment to indicate to readers that this is a series of stories. Not even a link in the follow story back to the initial piece. Odd, and not very webby.
Other stories don't have this problem. A story about a recent statewide poll does link to previous stories, which is good. There's also a list of related stories in the c column, which is even better. I think this kind of treatment should be standard fare: more organic links to related stories in the body text (and please just link to them in context; don't use "here" or, worse, "click here"). Also, I kind of think related links should go on the homepage under the synopsis, and in the in-line promo on the story page, not buried in the c column where few will notice it. God invented the c column for ads anyway.
One tiny content-related nit: The story mentions on the bottom that the margin of error was "+/- 3.46 percent." I'm willing to wager my right arm that should be "3.46 percentage points."
Getting back to the homepage, I think the idea of rotating feature stories randomly is interesting, but probably not necessary. Maybe I'm old school, but I say pick something to feature and go with it.
A bigger issue is the relationship of stories in the center position to the rest of the page. As I said earlier, one of the stories in the center rotation is a day old. To my mind, the only reason to keep a story in a feature position so long is because it's of major importance, which, apparently, the piece on dropout rates is. But if that's so, I shouldn't have to land on it by chance. A day old story should be in the center, or migrated gracefully down the page. But where?
The relationship between the feature well and the sections just below it ("More Top Stories" and "The Rest") is unclear. I'm not even sure I understand what these lists are: "More Top Stories" is fine, and makes sense. But what is "The Rest"? It sounds like a place stories go to die, but looking at what actually is in there, that's not the case at all. It looks, at least right now, that "The Rest" is where multimedia goes -- so why not just call it "Multimedia"?
Oops, wait. As I was writing this, something called "The Brief" showed up in that list. It appears to be a daily roundup of news from around the site, and the web at large. OK, now I'm really confused.
Anyway, this needs some looking into, because some of the multimedia is pretty interesting -- especially Evan Smith's interview with Dan Bartlett. And all of it is more recent than one of the stories in the feature positions. Why aren't these worthy of a feature position? Odd.
Further down the page, things break down a little bit. The modules in the c-column I'm not in love with, and make what's in them feel like third-party content, and not a part of the rest of the site. If it were up to me, I'd pull TribWire off completely, and integrate it with stories as related links where appropriate, perhaps with some kind of icon to indicate that this is a related link off the site.
Regardless, this is far, far too much prime real estate to devote to this feature. Meanwhile, other content that is kind of important is getting buried. I'd shift the blogs up to the top of the column (they really shouldn't be below the fold), and pull them out of that chunky module so they feel like part of the site.
Tweetwire is an interesting idea, but I'd rather see it further down the page, or just promoed. And unless you have seen such features before, it's a little hard to figure out at first glance what it is -- even if you are a Twitter user. It's also not helpful that readers see only one tweet at a time, which may or may not be interesting or helpful in figuring out what it is. (I just learned that Michael Williams, who serves on the Texas Railroad Commission, is going to use an electric razor for the first time this today. Good luck Michael!)
A little lighter touch on these modules would help, and rearranging them on the page would be a big improvement. I would promote the blogs and most emailed/viewed/blogged/searched modules up the page, and move TweetWire and TribWire down. Or even off.
Finally, the site is a bit light on social media tools and, especially, RSS. There's no autodiscovery anywhere to be found (at least that I was able to find), and although features that scream for an RSS feed (TribWire, Our Blogs) have them clearly marked in the homepage modules, there's no autodiscovery or even a link to the feed inside the site. As for social media, that's a little trickier to implement well, and I'm willing to bet it's tops on the list of coming features.
Having said all that, nothing I've mentioned here is fatal, and most of it is fairly nitpicky (and in some cases, I'll grant you, a matter of preference). All in all, the site is outstanding -- an amazing piece of work, given the insane time constraints the development team was working under. I'm really looking forward to reading more.
UPDATE: Brian Hamman is insisiting I disclose that Matt Waite and Chase Davis, who I believe worked on the backend and CMS for the Tribune, are friends of mine -- even though I'm sure neither had a lot to do (if anything) with the design. But, Brian was threatening to out me on Twitter, so there you go. (Happy now?)
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:55
Tags design, journalism, nonprofit, texas, tribune
