4 ms·

The homepage isn't dead exactly - just have different requirements. Drudge Report is a big driver and example of this. Arts and Letters Daily is a highbrow exam

by lmg643 12y ago

The homepage isn't dead exactly - just have different requirements. Drudge Report is a big driver and example of this. Arts and Letters Daily is a highbrow example. Basically, there is still demand for a curated home page, just with a lot less fluff. The other day, I was looking at the WSJ website and wishing they would just put all the content on one page so I could scan it more easily. I want to see everything they have to offer as easily as possible. Bloomberg.com is moving in this direction - about time for the others. As for handwringing about the content of page one at the NYT - the physical edition of the paper is going to continue to decline in importance until it's gone, so they would be right to stop worrying about it so much. Give readers a page of consolidated links to all current articles - they're likely to browse.

marincounty 12y ago
Yea--I feel the pendulum has swung too far. I like a home page with a lot of stories, and links. Actually, I wanted a old fashioned front page with links to the papers I read, so I put up newsranch.mine. It's a terrible website--doesen't work on mobile devises, and has a bunch of dead links, but it's my homepage. Please, don't go to it and tell me how bad it is; I don't care. I'm it's only visitor. One day I will clean it up, and fix the dead links. My point is I don't like homepages with just a few headlines, or links. I'm really surprised Google didn't do a better job with their news site. I really want to like it. I just figured they would do a stellar job, considering the talent they have.
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
But half the point of newspaper lead journalism is curation. What is supposed to be most important right now. I don't have time to scan every news feed and assess the relative importance, and despite pg's best efforts crowd sourcing the results also is not good enough. So far the only way that works even vaguely well is to take intelligent young people and pass them around the world, seeing the best and worst of humanity and writing about it each day. After 30 years they get pretty good at sifting the important stuff. We then make them editors. There may be a better way. Maybe an algorithm. But I would like to take a generation of two of parallel running just to be on the safe side.
- dreamfactory2 12y ago
  The way to do it is to combine manually-selected articles and auto generated (dynamically based on things like topic, date, time of day, popularity, visitor's locale, visitor's behaviour, visitor's preferences, commercial promotions, segment etc etc).
  - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
    really - that sounds like a recipie for self-fulfilling prophecies and an ever shrinking bubble of my initial interests.
    - dreamfactory2 12y ago
      Manually selected by editorial staff aka curation. This mix of manual and auto with high granularity of content reuse is what all the big publishers either do or want to as it drives up pages per visit (ad impressions, measure of engagement).

by lmg643 12y ago

marincounty 12y ago

Yea--I feel the pendulum has swung too far. I like a home page with a lot of stories, and links. Actually, I wanted a old fashioned front page with links to the papers I read, so I put up newsranch.mine. It's a terrible website--doesen't work on mobile devises, and has a bunch of dead links, but it's my homepage. Please, don't go to it and tell me how bad it is; I don't care. I'm it's only visitor. One day I will clean it up, and fix the dead links. My point is I don't like homepages with just a few headlines, or links. I'm really surprised Google didn't do a better job with their news site. I really want to like it. I just figured they would do a stellar job, considering the talent they have.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

But half the point of newspaper lead journalism is curation. What is supposed to be most important right now. I don't have time to scan every news feed and assess the relative importance, and despite pg's best efforts crowd sourcing the results also is not good enough. So far the only way that works even vaguely well is to take intelligent young people and pass them around the world, seeing the best and worst of humanity and writing about it each day. After 30 years they get pretty good at sifting the important stuff. We then make them editors. There may be a better way. Maybe an algorithm. But I would like to take a generation of two of parallel running just to be on the safe side.

dreamfactory2 12y ago
The way to do it is to combine manually-selected articles and auto generated (dynamically based on things like topic, date, time of day, popularity, visitor's locale, visitor's behaviour, visitor's preferences, commercial promotions, segment etc etc).
- lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  really - that sounds like a recipie for self-fulfilling prophecies and an ever shrinking bubble of my initial interests.
  - dreamfactory2 12y ago
    Manually selected by editorial staff aka curation. This mix of manual and auto with high granularity of content reuse is what all the big publishers either do or want to as it drives up pages per visit (ad impressions, measure of engagement).