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I think you have over-evangelised this blog spam from buzz feed. I think the NYT situation is a million miles away from your conclusion that the homepage is dea

I think you have over-evangelised this blog spam from buzz feed. I think the NYT situation is a million miles away from your conclusion that the homepage is dead, far from it. Walk into any British office at lunchtime and, on people's screens, you will see the BBC news homepage (but never the BBC homepage), the Daily Mail homepage and The Guardian homepage. People go to those places to read the news. They might go onto Facebook, HN or a myriad of other places later. However, outside of the offices of Trinity Mirror, nobody goes to the home page of The Mirror or this abomination 'ampped' that you have blog-spammed here. As a small child I was appalled at the standard of the content in the tabloid newspapers (I could read the short articles in the Guardian at quite a young age). It seemed the reading age was below my own. It was and, although initially unimpressed, over the years I have been able to better appreciate their craft (particularly if the story is an exciting human interest one e.g. the downfall of yet another child molesting BBC personality). Much like how you can respect a casino for the work they put in to make sure all their customers spend as much as possible, morals and ethics can be put aside and respect for the craft seen for what it is with British tabloid journalism. Done well, there is an art to it. You might not have page 3 girls in this new 'ampputated' effort (I forget the name), however, it is the worst abomination ever in the history of British journalism. It isn't even journalism or what you might call news. It is a Wordpress blog light on content with a pastiche version of the Metro/classic tabloid print presentation. Content is king, journalism still rules. Get it right - BBC, Guardian, Daily Mail, (The Telegraph to a lesser extent) - and people flock in droves. They fire up the homepage out of choice. It is where they go for news. The also-ran, dead-zombie British press is: the rubbish from Murdoch, the trash churned out by the idiots that work for that porn baron who happens to own the Express, that me-too rubbish from Trinity Mirror and whatever The Independent is these days. All of it rubbish. Nobody thinks 'I must see what news the Mirror is reporting', do they? Or if they do, do they then hop on over to 'myspace'? Or 'Friends Reunited'? I am sure you have figures showing how many trillions of people read the Mirror online, but the myspace people could probably show you similar numbers proving they are bigger than Pinterest. On to the NYT. The NYT is one of those bits of internet furniture like Wired, Buzzfeed or countless other places where the homepage is no longer a destination. They have got the secret sauce wrong and people prefer somewhere else to go to for their news. However, they do have plenty of readers who do find the quality beyond the homepage and those people do post whatever it is that they find to plenty of other places. If you follow HN you find yourself reading articles in Forbes, Wired, the NYT all the time. But you never think to start your leisure browsing at those places. It just does not happen.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago
But ... why? Why do I go to news.bbc.co.uk to see what is happening in the world today and not NYT.com or indiatoday.com or any one of a dozen homepages of respected journalism? I think it is obvious why we don't go to the national enquirer homepage or the daily mirror page. But it is not clear why the Guardian or the bbc leads these. Is it I have a values alignment with them? Is it because I live in the UK? Is it because ... the recent leak from the NYT was fascinating and I still struggle to see what the secret sauce as you call it is. but it's not journalism I think. that's a necessary but not sufficient condition. Edit: actually I think I might know. I want an editor for my news - a real human dyed in the wools Jason Robards editor. I doubt I will see a difference in the editor at TimesOfIndia, or the telegraph - so why do I not visit either front page. Both in English, both mostly cover international stories I cRe about. What matters is an more international flavour, a recognition that while local matters, we are almost a global society. And most important of all - they have short urls. oh hell I dunno. Edit2: but saying, as the Article does "every page is the homepage" is missing the point. Yes every page needs to have the current list if top stories - that's called navigation. But which stories are top ? That's an editorial decision that worrying about the homepage encapsulates
- Theodores 12y ago
  Why do you come to HN? Not Slashdot? The rules are simple at HN, it isn't particularly curated. The fonts and presentation is a tad 1990's. But, more people visit HN than Slashdot (I liked Slashdot a decade ago). Think again. Go back to the bean counters in head office with some outrageous idea, a 'Pinterest' type of thing for news... Imagine a newspaper with a non-curated homepage. Effectively the homepage was an open ended search query. In that query you could retrieve stories and present them simple blog style, last in, first at the top. However, in that search query there would be different weightings. So category would be one weighting, region would be another, favourite writer would be another and so on. Then, for new user, they would get default weightings with their GeoIP bearing on the region, so, if Welsh, stories relating to Wales would get given prominence by that weighting factor. As new reader reads stuff the weightings get learned. If they like celebrity nonsense then the category weighting for that goes up. Equally if they like city news, stocks and all that stuff, then the weighting for business stories goes up, just by their act of reading what they like to read. In this weighting, all the stories would be in their feed, however, things with a lower weighting would be further down the page, for that reader they would be 'released' later. So, the top of the page would be what they are interested in based on what they read, further down the page there would be less important stuff to them. Miles down the page it would effectively be a core dump of all the major news wires. Imagine some story comes out about some Z list celebrity getting a new car. For most people that would not feature on the homepage, but, for someone into Z list celebrities it would. Come back six hours later, scroll miles down that page and the story would be there, for all to see and read if they could be bothered with the mile long scroll. The story would effectively be deferred but not for the person that likes such stuff. For the city guy, that story about shares in GSK going up one penny might make it to the top. Everyone else gets it deferred but still timeline accurate. In this system there might be no need whatsoever to categorise stories explicitly. Or to decide what their placement is. There might not be a need for any content management system at all. Content management could be crowd sourced, with people 'pinning' stories to boards where those boards are ad-hoc de-facto 'categories'. This 'pinning' process might not be explicit, it could be learned from search. If someone searches for the Z-list celebrity and then goes on from that story to read about cars then that story is potentially also a 'car' category story too. Imagine if you liked some news worthy person, e.g. Cliff Richard. You could have some 'like button'/'pin' that you tag to the name so you are able to guarantee that 'Cliff Richard' always makes it to your feed, even if the story is just him doing up his shoelaces. You can also watch if someone actually reads a story. You can time how long they have the story open for, you know their reading speed. You know everyone else's reading speed. You know where the content has failed, as in, at what point they got bored of reading it and mouse/scroll activity stopped. I don't know if you have ever noticed, but Google don't categorise search results. The portals and web directories that pre-dated Google did do such things. Now just imagine, with the rich content of news, if you completely got rid of the filing stuff in categories thing and just made it all work off search. By default the search results would be everything that ever happened, weighted by region, writer and a myriad of other categories. For a given reader they or you might not even know what those categories were, they could be devised ad hoc, based on browsing history and explicit likes/pins. Everyone would always have a different homepage, furthermore, there would just be that one homepage. Stories could be presented in pop-ups so you didn't have to hit the back button. Tying it into an ad platform could be fun. This could break away from the tedium of today's pages where there are twenty or so bugs on the page, doing whatever. It could be put server side. You could sell ads to people based on what their guestimated search rating was, so, rather than show people the ad from that shop they visited two weeks ago, show them some shop they are going to visit next. The ad model is flawed, ads are shown for that posh camera you bought after you bought it, not before. Or after you decided you by a new TV instead. They don't do a good job of creating demand. Run fewer ads, tie them to affiliate schemes as per normal but deliver new leads rather than re-treads. Again, do what Google do, but more focused on the opportunities present in news, leverage search and deliver the ads. Your point regarding editors - nobody knows who editors are these days. In the 1980's everyone knew who they all were, they were household names. You are obviously technically able, therefore, if you want to re-do how news is done, pick up the solr search engine, create your own indexes and feed them into the search with adjustable weightings. Those indexes, experiment with them and see what you get out with a 'search for nothing' and what you get out searching more generally. Instead of an explicit 'politics' category, the 'politics' tab could be just a keyword, the search goes off and does the rest. See if you can get the search to learn, ideally to get to a point where the results are far better than today's curated newspapers yet you have absolutely no idea how it works. Bring some Skynet awareness to it just by giving it lots to search and weight stories by. It doesn't have to be much more sophisticated than the 'Pinterest' home page and they managed something... Your bean counters are in for the long haul. They know the writing is on the wall with where they are going and that news has to be redone, somehow. Someone at some news company has to step outside the way things have been done and come back with some new ideas borrowed from how search has worked for the mainstream internets.

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

But ... why? Why do I go to news.bbc.co.uk to see what is happening in the world today and not NYT.com or indiatoday.com or any one of a dozen homepages of respected journalism? I think it is obvious why we don't go to the national enquirer homepage or the daily mirror page. But it is not clear why the Guardian or the bbc leads these. Is it I have a values alignment with them? Is it because I live in the UK? Is it because ... the recent leak from the NYT was fascinating and I still struggle to see what the secret sauce as you call it is. but it's not journalism I think. that's a necessary but not sufficient condition. Edit: actually I think I might know. I want an editor for my news - a real human dyed in the wools Jason Robards editor. I doubt I will see a difference in the editor at TimesOfIndia, or the telegraph - so why do I not visit either front page. Both in English, both mostly cover international stories I cRe about. What matters is an more international flavour, a recognition that while local matters, we are almost a global society. And most important of all - they have short urls. oh hell I dunno. Edit2: but saying, as the Article does "every page is the homepage" is missing the point. Yes every page needs to have the current list if top stories - that's called navigation. But which stories are top ? That's an editorial decision that worrying about the homepage encapsulates

Theodores 12y ago
Why do you come to HN? Not Slashdot? The rules are simple at HN, it isn't particularly curated. The fonts and presentation is a tad 1990's. But, more people visit HN than Slashdot (I liked Slashdot a decade ago). Think again. Go back to the bean counters in head office with some outrageous idea, a 'Pinterest' type of thing for news... Imagine a newspaper with a non-curated homepage. Effectively the homepage was an open ended search query. In that query you could retrieve stories and present them simple blog style, last in, first at the top. However, in that search query there would be different weightings. So category would be one weighting, region would be another, favourite writer would be another and so on. Then, for new user, they would get default weightings with their GeoIP bearing on the region, so, if Welsh, stories relating to Wales would get given prominence by that weighting factor. As new reader reads stuff the weightings get learned. If they like celebrity nonsense then the category weighting for that goes up. Equally if they like city news, stocks and all that stuff, then the weighting for business stories goes up, just by their act of reading what they like to read. In this weighting, all the stories would be in their feed, however, things with a lower weighting would be further down the page, for that reader they would be 'released' later. So, the top of the page would be what they are interested in based on what they read, further down the page there would be less important stuff to them. Miles down the page it would effectively be a core dump of all the major news wires. Imagine some story comes out about some Z list celebrity getting a new car. For most people that would not feature on the homepage, but, for someone into Z list celebrities it would. Come back six hours later, scroll miles down that page and the story would be there, for all to see and read if they could be bothered with the mile long scroll. The story would effectively be deferred but not for the person that likes such stuff. For the city guy, that story about shares in GSK going up one penny might make it to the top. Everyone else gets it deferred but still timeline accurate. In this system there might be no need whatsoever to categorise stories explicitly. Or to decide what their placement is. There might not be a need for any content management system at all. Content management could be crowd sourced, with people 'pinning' stories to boards where those boards are ad-hoc de-facto 'categories'. This 'pinning' process might not be explicit, it could be learned from search. If someone searches for the Z-list celebrity and then goes on from that story to read about cars then that story is potentially also a 'car' category story too. Imagine if you liked some news worthy person, e.g. Cliff Richard. You could have some 'like button'/'pin' that you tag to the name so you are able to guarantee that 'Cliff Richard' always makes it to your feed, even if the story is just him doing up his shoelaces. You can also watch if someone actually reads a story. You can time how long they have the story open for, you know their reading speed. You know everyone else's reading speed. You know where the content has failed, as in, at what point they got bored of reading it and mouse/scroll activity stopped. I don't know if you have ever noticed, but Google don't categorise search results. The portals and web directories that pre-dated Google did do such things. Now just imagine, with the rich content of news, if you completely got rid of the filing stuff in categories thing and just made it all work off search. By default the search results would be everything that ever happened, weighted by region, writer and a myriad of other categories. For a given reader they or you might not even know what those categories were, they could be devised ad hoc, based on browsing history and explicit likes/pins. Everyone would always have a different homepage, furthermore, there would just be that one homepage. Stories could be presented in pop-ups so you didn't have to hit the back button. Tying it into an ad platform could be fun. This could break away from the tedium of today's pages where there are twenty or so bugs on the page, doing whatever. It could be put server side. You could sell ads to people based on what their guestimated search rating was, so, rather than show people the ad from that shop they visited two weeks ago, show them some shop they are going to visit next. The ad model is flawed, ads are shown for that posh camera you bought after you bought it, not before. Or after you decided you by a new TV instead. They don't do a good job of creating demand. Run fewer ads, tie them to affiliate schemes as per normal but deliver new leads rather than re-treads. Again, do what Google do, but more focused on the opportunities present in news, leverage search and deliver the ads. Your point regarding editors - nobody knows who editors are these days. In the 1980's everyone knew who they all were, they were household names. You are obviously technically able, therefore, if you want to re-do how news is done, pick up the solr search engine, create your own indexes and feed them into the search with adjustable weightings. Those indexes, experiment with them and see what you get out with a 'search for nothing' and what you get out searching more generally. Instead of an explicit 'politics' category, the 'politics' tab could be just a keyword, the search goes off and does the rest. See if you can get the search to learn, ideally to get to a point where the results are far better than today's curated newspapers yet you have absolutely no idea how it works. Bring some Skynet awareness to it just by giving it lots to search and weight stories by. It doesn't have to be much more sophisticated than the 'Pinterest' home page and they managed something... Your bean counters are in for the long haul. They know the writing is on the wall with where they are going and that news has to be redone, somehow. Someone at some news company has to step outside the way things have been done and come back with some new ideas borrowed from how search has worked for the mainstream internets.