“Digital news is broken”

Andy Rutledge:

In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise…which they call content.

In an effort to disguise and mitigate the fact that they have little idea how to publish digital content properly—often sneakily called “differentiation”—some news outlets release apps for digital devices. These apps typically (but not always) do a better job of presenting content and facilitating navigation, but they’re a band aid on a festering abdominal wound. Digital media is simply digital media; if you do it right you publish once and it works anywhere. If you’re using an app to deliver content, you’re doing it wrong.

He uses the New York Times as a case study. I tend to read the Times through their iPhone app so I don’t go to their website all that often, but he's right: it’s a mess. His concepts for a more “attractive” presentation of digital news is just that. Via Daring Fireball

Update: Martin Belam — the Guardian.co.uk’s “Lead User Experience & Information Architect” — responds to Rutledge: “...there were 4 key areas where I very much disagree with Andy’s analysis, and think it would fail to engage with mainstream news readers.”