Everything New(s) is Old Again

MSNBC is touting its new web design using the word big quite a bit. “Bigger pictures. Bigger video. Bigger text.” They’re highlighting new story layouts that don’t force the user to click through to multiple pages. This is a good thing. They also rolled out a new video player that, while improved, really only brings them up to parity with other video-centric sites. Still, that’s a good thing, too.

But in this redesign they seemed to have missed the most important thing of all. The new MSNBC.com page is still based on the same premise that the Armchair team developed 15 years ago when we were all employees of CNN and launched CNN.com. It is still the front page of a newspaper at heart. And that just doesn’t fly any longer.

Take a little test that I put to news professionals at the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) convention back in April. Look at the images below. Try to decide which of these home pages belong to television news organizations and which come from newspapers. The true identities are below, so scroll down to see how you did. No peeking!

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Actually, they are all from TV news sites. (In order they are ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, CNN.com, FoxNews.com and MSNBC.com.) Surprised? Like the group of TV news producers I spoke to, you probably assumed many if not all were newspapers. Why is this? Well, look closely. Where’s the video? It’s television news’ number one (only?) strong suit online, especially when it’s live, yet all the major TV news sites continue to treat it as just another asset, usually by cordoning it off in its own section.

No one uses video like that any longer. Users want to go right to it, watch it, share it, and move on, usually to more video. With YouTube and seemingly a thousand other video sites dominating web traffic, especially among younger audiences, why haven’t the big video news sites gotten the message?