030507

USA Yesterday and USAToday

It seems like only yesterday that USAToday.com was your typical newspaper site. There were articles and you read them. I visited from time-to-time to see what original stories there might be on a given day, but it was not one of my regular destinations. The national paper’s multicolored design, created to contrast with the black-and-white papers common in the early 1980’s, carried over into USAToday.com, giving it a somewhat garish appearance that pulled the eye away from a lot of the actual journalism.

The new USAToday.com, launched last week, is much cleaner. The pictures are larger, the important stories are more noticeable. They have still made some really bizarre ad placement choices, but overall the visual improvement is impressive. I really like some of the smaller details like the placing each article’s age and other relevant data consistently near the title. They’ve also implemented category tags (strangely placing them in the middle of each article), which I have not yet found particularly useful, but it’s nice to have them.

As a property of the Gannett newspaper publishing group, USAToday has the advantage of being able to pull stories from other Gannett papers to appear alongside original stories, instead of relying too much on newswire services like Reuters and the Associated Press. Newswire services are one of the problems with online news. Not that they provide poor stories or anything, but they’re used by so many different news outlets, and any news search on a national or world topic will bring up fifty identical stories from fifty different newspapers. Sometimes the clutter is just too much.

The new USAToday.com layout gives more prominent positioning to original stories in the front page’s “Only on USA TODAY” section. The site’s “On Deadline” blog also now takes up half the screen if you click on the “News Notes” tab. Also in the right-hand column I noticed stories from the Arizona Republic and the Detroit Free Press, both Gannett papers. There were of course the obligatory newswire stories, but it’s nice to see that there are still some staff left in those cash-strapped newsrooms.

USAToday.com has also added a whole bunch of social features. Users can now leave comments, digg-ishly vote for stories so they appear in the “Most Popular” section, recommend stories to other USAToday.com readers, blog about stuff, and upload their own news photos. The voting thing is cool, and is not a rip-off of Digg. It will be interesting to see how the commenting goes. I think it’s a great idea for a newspaper as long as they’re obviously different from the companion article. Comments will need to be moderated, which means someone at USAToday.com now has an extra job.

Normally I would consider most of these social features, especially blogging and photo uploading, useless clutter. Who wants to sign up for yet another free account when there’s already services like Blogger, MySpace and Flickr? I’m still not sure what a reader of USA Today will get out of having yet another blog or yet another place to upload photos, but a site profile is a good way to keep track of a user’s comments and “Recommendations.” For the site owners, it may also be a way to get people coming back more frequently.

I’ve signed up for an account. I doubt I’ll be blogging from USAToday.com, but I bet these new features will send me back to the site more often than simply “from time-to-time.”