Selling the Experience of Reading the News

With the exception of my father and a handful of others hungry to hang on to the nostalgia of breaking open the NY Times over an espresso and breakfast on Sunday mornings, everyone I know accesses their “need to know” news via the web—why pick up a paper when you have the news of the world in the palm of your hand and in many cases, for free?

Back when I used to read print newspapers, the aesthetics of the reading experience were really important and went so far as to determine which papers I favored over others. For example, the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News was my go-to read largely because it was printed magazine style without the “below the fold” aspect that the Denver Post employed and continues to employ. The NY Times carries with it both in print and reputation, the air of sophistication—it’s an old school, urban newspaper highly regarded for it’s vast coverage of news worldwide. There was always that certain self-importance one felt when sprawled over one of these papers in a coffee shop in the early hours of the day. The Wall Street Journal with its clever penciled renderings of the notable contributors echoed a similar thought: this was a publication for smart people.

The list goes on and on. Time and Newsweek were other publications I once read with a religious fervor until my life was swallowed up in the film industry. Either way, when I came back to reading the news, the platform was and remains totally different—blogs, Twitter, FB, and a plethora of other news sources have taken over the place in my life that news-specific publications once held. Again, the same factors come into play: page layout, site navigation, diversity of coverage, et cetera. In short, aesthetics.

The irony in this is that instead of focusing on what they’re delivering to readers, the newspapers have allowed themselves to become entirely enveloped in the crush of, “How do we get people to pay for content? How do we survive the move to digital?” The stereotypical layout found on most news sites today is columnar with a mash of bold headlines, images, and occasionally video. Some websites do this well. Some do not.

Case in point: Newsweek/Daily Beast versus Time. Layout is the same, but I’m more keen to read Newsweek than ever visit Time’s website. Why? They’ve copied Newsweek down to the colors, but chosen to put too much on the homepage in a serif font (which does not translate well online,) avoided sectioning in any identifiable way, and can you say, “Too much red?”

Newspapers, in the digital era, are no longer selling the news. They are selling the experience of reading the news.