How should news sites handle dissatisfied and grumpy readers after going through the rigours of a major redesign?
Here’s how two major organisations handled it.
Google News, which recently introduced major design changes, oriented mostly towards better personalisation, gave back readers a bit of what they wanted: "…some of you wrote in to say you [...]

No, we are not talking about customization here.
No, not at all. I’m describing the interesting and curious case of Phyl Gyford who thought that there was a thing or two about news websites that needed to be sorted out. And he went ahead and did just that - on his own.

Now before we [...]

Google has come up with a Wordpress plugin that will make it possible for many to try out its experimental Living Stories model of news presentation themselves.
The Living Stories model was centered on an ongoing news development - a kind of a news thread - that would be updated with new stories and associated content.

I [...]

Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes that it is “personalized news-reading experiences on mobile-type devices” that will dominate the media scene in over a decade or so.
“And that that(sic) kind of news consumption will be very personal, very targeted. It will remember what you know. It will suggest things that you might want to know. It [...]

Google News has started clearly identifying news sites’ blog content with a ‘blog’ label.
This makes it easy for users to distinguish between such blog content and regular news stories listed on its pages.
A post in the Google News blog said: "As you may know, we’ve always included some blogs from news organizations in Google News. [...]

Finding ways of enticing users to explore the huge reservoir of news resources hidden beneath the front and section pages of news sites is a huge challenge for them.
It’s clear that conventional multi-tiered navigation can go only part of the way in opening up these resources to users in a useful manner and facilitate what’s [...]

News sites have to deal with long lists, usually of story headlines and related story links. Well there is the problem of making these dull information-packed pages visually interesting, and one way of doing this is to ‘add ambient visual data’ to them says this Neiman Journalism Lab post, referring to the experiment of a [...]

The mobile web is not that big a deal for news sites right now, but trends do indicate that it will become popular as mobile phones get better and better. Statistics quoted by  a Newspaper Association of America (NAA) report some time ago indicate that those who access news on mobile browsers range between 7 [...]

OJR had an article recently on an eyetracking study involving young people; here I will touch upon some points that I thought were interesting. The study had to do with a comparison of San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times sites.
An interesting finding was that sidebar and related story material boxes drew the attention [...]

A new set of accessibility guidelines, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, have been brought out by the W3C, the global web standards defining body. While sites in some countries are mandatorily required to meet accessibility norms under certain circumstances, there are plenty of good reasons for news sites to try to meet these, [...]

Do news sites have something to learn from Google’s ten principles that guide user experience design, which have been described in detail on its site.
Let’s juxtapose them in the context of online news (not necessarily in the order in which Google has listed them) and see how it works out. (Yes, I know that Google’s [...]