Weblog for New Media Storytelling

Posted: 12:30 p.m. 10/22/01

Information architecture - Chicagotribune.com's "War on Terror"

I read a book a few weeks ago about Americans in Denmark. A good part of the book dealt with how the Americans have trouble getting used to "janteloven." This Scandinavian cultural principle puts the masses above the person, encouraging people to fit in rather than stand out.

When it comes to designing their terrorism/homeland defense coverage, Chicagotribune.com sadly seems to be following the same principle. On their site, what should be important gets little more recognition than what is less important.

Although an improvement over past attempts, the site's current information architecture seems best designed to handle the normal, day-to-day Chicago life. The design was not built to handle the extraordinary times we are living in, and that is why it fails.

The Tribune's new publishing tool and its related information architecture, both new this summer, are aimed at balancing the news, giving more stories some degree of prominence but never giving them unequal and unnecessary amounts of space. The architecture takes into account that different viewers want to view different things, whether they be different sections (sports or business) or different newspaper genres (straight news or columnists).

But when one story is all that is news and everything wants to read it, this new system breaks down. It cannot accommodate pushing one story far above the rest. Meanwhile, the site's producers seem unable to push the system to its potential. The combination makes the Tribune's IA mediocre.

Jelly Roll mistakes

I'd like to blame this all on Jelly Roll Morton backlash. The Tribune's old publishing tool put everything in its place because it could not put anything anywhere else. From a viewer's perspective, their old tool seemed stubborn. This made pages well organized but boring, and, on the front page, sometimes resulted in errors no human would make. (A commonly found example: Automatically using the first paragraph of a feature story as the front page blurb. A story starting with "Little Johnny plays basketball" may be an interesting story - say, if Little Johnny is a goldfish - but the blurb will make few Internet readers interested enough to find out.)

The Tribune's Jelly Roll Morton online feature (this link describes the feature -- the link to the feature itself is dead), based on a three part series in the print edition, included audio, video and photographs, all of which made the feature far different and more advanced than what the site viewers usually saw. (Whether it was more advanced than what other news sites were doing at the time is very debatable.) When it was debuted, the feature saw big play on the Web site, as many sites do with new products. Producers the feature in a special box above the front page's news content, giving Jelly Roll a huge chunk of room above the fold.

There Jelly Roll stayed for day after day, taking up a 4" wide by 2" tall box, if I remember correctly. As news came and went, it struck me as odd that producers kept him there. I realized that they had no where else to put him With their tool, seemingly the place he could really go on their front page was into the section boxes, but those were always reserved for the latest news. There was no secondary spot.

Jelly Roll backlash

Their redesign implemented this summer put in many secondary spots. The section boxes include more space for creativity, for additional pictures and links, and a right-hand sidebar gives space to features, columnists and small photos. These are all positives, but the publishing tool still seems inflexible and the producers do not seem to be taking advantage of its full abilities.

• Problems with the tool
  The tool is keeping all the information organized but seems to prevent much creativity. Take the link to the Tribune's full coverage section. The link on the front page is no bigger, no fancier and no more obvious than any of the other links. It is ridiculously titled "Tribune coverage."

  The section certainly deserves more than this. This section contains all the background a Chicago-area reader could want on the current situation, the events both abroad and locally. Stories, photo galleries, infographics, multimedia, message boards, content from Tribune Co. newspaper partners - it's all here. Isn't this library of information supposed to be what the Internet is about? Yet it is just nothing ho-hum link on the Tribune's front page because the right sidebar has a uniform text size and uniform link color.

  The full coverage section is where the tool should shine, presenting information in an organized and efficient way, but how many viewers will click to find out? This trend goes throughout the site, on all of its pages. The consistency of the text and links makes the site more boring and gives no sense of news value.

• Problems with producing
  On Sept. 11 and in days following, their producers showed what the new system could do to handle huge, breaking news. They changed the layout of the top news section to keep the section interesting, manipulated headline sizes to show relative importance and threw in front page links to many different stories. All of these abilities would have been impossible or at least very hindered previously. But now, the producers appear complacent. Headlines are more or less the same size, and pictures are being used sparingly.

  Also, two paragraphs ago, I said the full coverage section "should shine." With humans at the controls, the tool seems to be able to efficiently categorize information, but it is underutilized here. The Tribune's online archive only breaks down the stories by day. This archiving is perfect if one was going to create a timeline, but what news viewer is interested in tracking day-by-day coverage? Viewers are interested in topics, not chronologies. Viewers should expect their news sites to create timelines for them.

The Tribune needs to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to handle a dominating news event. Their site may have gotten prettier and more competent this summer, but necessary flexibility is still a long way off. In the meantime, their producers should be doing everything they can to make their pages more interesting. They cannot let themselves be slaves of their publishing system.