U-sentric is a Belgium-based user experience engineering and design company. 

Ms. Beysen and Tarra Shrimpton-Smith, a project manager at U-sentric, spoke with our Inge van Gaal at the Web Goes Mobile seminar in Grimbergen in Belgium on Dec. 4, 2008.

They explained why it is so important now to keep consumers happy, especially if you create a website in this so competitive world.

Watch full interview:

(Video by Tom Corbett of INMA.)

Results of exit polls from the first swinging states were known in Europe late at night on November 4-5 — at about 2 AM in London (GMT) or at 3 AM in Paris, Berlin and Warsaw (CET).

Obama’s victory was decided even later — at about 4 AM (GMT) or 5 AM (CET).

So it was a nightmare for newspaper editors.

In most of their printed editions they could do no more than play with readers and try to invite them to their online editions, as editors of a Belgian daily newspaper De Morgen did:

What did readers see online, when they logged in this morning?

(Want to see more front pages of printed editions of European newspapers? Go to gallery at Newseum.)

Some European newspapers invested in their websites to change its layout and offer interactive features they could not have provided in print.

Here’s a great example of the UK Guardian’s home page:

Changing a structure of this home page must have been much more expensive and time-consuming than changing a layout of a front page in print. They needed to involve not only editors and designers, but their technology staff.

Here is a collection of home pages of some other nationwide European newspapers, as retrieved at 9 AM (GMT) or 10 (AM CET) on November 5th:

Mr. Gaffre from Newsmedia company participanted at a recent INMA conference in Vienna (October 1-3, 2008) and shared his views with forum4editors.com on re-design process.

Michel Gaffre who worked on re-design of well known European daily newspapers like Le Monde in France and Les Temps in Switzerland underlines that design should serve the contents of the newspaper, but admits that people responsible for the contents sometimes oppose any change of layout.

“There are many people who don’t like to change. So you have to help them,” says Mr. Gaffre. “You can change the newspaper, but you have train its staff.”

According to him the main goal of layout re-design is to increase circulation. Sometimes the new layout does not help.

“When a project is not successful, the one to blame is the team from outside,” admits Mr. Gaffre.

Watch full interview with Michel Gaffre:

(Interview made by Artur Karda, multimedia reporter at Media Regionalne, Polish part of Mecom Group.) 

The Wall Street Journal’s new luxury lifestyle magazine, WSJ, debuted last week as a quaterly. It is expected to become a monthly next year.

The magazine will cover cars, fashion, property, philanthropy, personalities and travel. Of the 51 advertisers in the launch issue, 19 are new to the Journal.

Thomson, formerly an editor of the Times of London and a deputy at the Financial Times, invited his old brothers-in-arms to make the new magazine. WSJ’s editor is Tina Gaudoin, who was previously the editor of Luxx, a high-end supplement to the Times. And WSJ’s creative director, Tomaso Capuano, last worked on the FT’s supplement How to Spend It.

Negative reviews

Adam Hanft of Huffington Post writes: ”The Wall Street Journal Magazine is Irrelevant On Arrival” and calls it: ”ill-conceived, ill-timed and epically copy-cattish endeavor.”

Hanft dislikes especially:

• a feature about Sarah Palin, a governor of Alaska, as it – unfortunately for the Journal – was written before she was announced a vice-presidential nominee. It made this feature ”an instant, chilling anachronism.”
• a model on the cover, ”a clumsy, solipsistic shot of a woman in a WSJ paper dress – a strange and otherwise un-referenced homage to the 1960s.”
• illogical, flat and uninspired department headers like “Hunter” and  “Gatherer”: ”there’s no rhyme or reason to the split: why does racecar collection earn the sign of a hunter, while a jewelry story is stuck in the cross hairs of the gatherer?”
• the rest of contents: ”It’s nothing I haven’t read before, seen before, cringed at before.”

Andrew Losovsky states gently that the contents ”just isn’t very good”.

”For a magazine supposedly aimed at a ‘well-read, discerning about what you consume… multi-faceted, multi-talented group with a sense of humor’ (according to the intro letter) some of the content feels too obvious for a discerning, knowledgeable crowd, and they all read as uncritical fluff in a way that the main paper would never allow.”

Losovsky is disappointed by the ”too-obvious luxury namedrops”: mentions of a Stradivarius; Virgin Galactic; Hollywood actors buying islands; the Louvre in Abu Dhabi; a new bar in the Peninsular Hotel in Hong Kong etc.:

”Exceptions were Lulu Wang’s car collection, the best safety videos on airlines, and a collection of wallets combined with a Dürer illustration. Those were good, but the rest made me yawn.”

Virginia Postrel of the Deep Glamour notes that ”the magazine just isn’t smart enough”:

”As a lifelong WSJ fan, I had high hopes for the magazine. The Journal is a great newspaper, intelligently written and edited for smart people. Its style coverage, whether oriented toward business or culture, is as good as the rest of the paper. But the magazine isn’t. Good ideas–the evolution of ‘lifestyle’ identities for jewelry, for instance–are executed in a superficial way, while good writers are wasted. Architecture critic Alastair Gordon, who wrote the terrific book Naked Airport, is given a six whole paragraphs to tell us about a house. The most substantive piece, perhaps because it could have run on the real WSJ’s front page, is a feature on how cruise lines are luxing up their accommodations and separating the big spenders from the riff-raff.”

Postrel recalls another WSJ venture in magazine journalism: the single prototype issue of The Wall Street Journal Magazine, published the summer of 1981, that in her opinion had much better words-versus-pictures balance. You can see some of old pages on her blog.

Vincent Valk of the Gelflog compares WSJ to the Parade, a national Sunday newspaper magazine, distributed in more than 400 newspapers in the US. It is known for its celebrity gossips, promotions and very early deadline – 15 days prior publication date. So in January 2008 they made a cover story about Benazir Bhutto’s election prospects, despite her death on December 27th, 2007.

Valk writes:

”It’s Parade for superrich investment bankers, rife with coverage of the rich and stylish and consumer goods you can’t afford. If you were expecting, say, a rightward-leaning New York Times Magazine, look elsewhere.”

Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation Media Consulting Group as always goes straight and calls the new magazine simply ”a flop”.

Positive reviews

However, there is somebody who says that WSJ sets the new standard for luxury magazines.

Samir Husni, or Mr. Magazine, writes on his blog:

”Elegant, upscale and aimed at the ‘cream of the crop’ of The Wall Street Journal readers, the magazine offers its readers a European look and feel from the cover all the way to the inside pages…

WSJ. magazine is yet another welcomed new magazine bucking the trend that print is dead and the future is for something else. The audience of WSJ. was already there, the advertisers were already there, all what the folks at the Journal had to do was build the bridge that links the readers/customers to the advertisers…and they build one good ‘London’ bridge… In fact, WSJ. is, to me, the new standard in luxury magazines and has become my standard (even after only one issue) in comparing other luxury magazines to.”

Others praise at least some parts of the WSJ.

Mario Garcia, a well known newspaper designer, likes the design:

”WSJ does not disappoint visually. White space waltz in and out of the pages. The font selection sets it apart from many of its competitors. I was thinking that the design was minimalist, but perhaps that is not the best way to describe it: minimalist design tends to be more skeletal than what Tomaso has carried out in his design for WSJ. Some of the photos bleed off the page, something minimalist designs usually avoid, as the emphasis would be on framing with white space around the page.”

Disclosure: Garcia worked on the layout of the main Journal. However, he is not afraid to get a bit ironic, when he notices:

”One good thing: texts are short, photos are big, and many of these ‘luxury’ readers will be satisfied to get through the magazine pretty quickly.”

Magazine Smitten thinks ”the cover was phenomenal. I mean, that dress!” Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation also likes the cover. And Andrew Losovsky sees ”solid structure, a supplement-y feel that goes well enough with the main paper, and an inoffensively tidy design that feels a little out of date, but not objectionably so. It has the foundations to create something interesting.”

Metaprinter, in spite of some minor faults, finds the magazine innovative.

”YES! Why innovation?
• New revenue stream
• Highly targeted product that grows your brand
• No third party applications required
• Deliverable cannot be aped by online companies
• Magazine.wsj.com website grows their multimedia offerings”

Finally…

Watch a video showing how the WSJ dress was made:

Join the debate

Have you read the new WSJ magazine? What do you think? Is it a flop or a good start?

Kevin Anderson, blogs editor for the UK Guardian, writes about a discussion prompted by a question posed by Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of New Media with Al Jazeera, on Twitter.

Journalists, editors and consultants, cited by Kevin, suggest some keywords (in random order):

”Relevance, discoveribility and depth. Syndication, participation, embeddable content, bridges to the flow on the web, mobile access. Story tracking tool, satire, live feed of the newsroom in action, ticker tape of hyper links showing breaking story. Automatic semantic tagging, related links, user-customisable RSS, SEO friendly URLs, Apture-style auto linking, good comments system. RSS at every juncture. pingback in all external linking. Alerts to journalists when people comment on their stories, with time set aside for response.”

With all the respect to these nice features and ideas, I believe there are some other issues to be considered.

Here is my list:

1. A mission, or a reason: why do I launch this site and why should anybody care about it? What would make your site unique?
2. Things to be discovered: what important do I want to learn, or tell the others about?
3. People to be met: whom would I like to meet and talk to? Why others should be excited about these people?
4. Story-telling: how am I going to tell stories about those things and poeple in an attractive and unique way?
5. Design of story-gathering process and quality management: how am I going to find these things and people and how am I going to tell their stories in a way you want? Who will be doing it? As Steve Jobs keeps saying, design is not how it looks like. ”Design is how it works.”
6. Design of interactions: what will be the experience of my reader/user when reading/viewing/using my site? How am I going to involve them in my processes? How am I going to respond to any problems they face? How am I going to help those individuals to play together and form a community? Why people would join it? Why would they fall in love with it?
7. Brand and marketing: what are the keywords? The image I want to achieve? How am I going to do make people understand this image, the brand’s values and my mission? (Here’s the moment I add all the marketing stuff, including the design understood as a layout).
8. Technology, other features… they may be story trackers, live feeds and RSS – whatever suits my mission and brand image.
9. Money issue # 1: who is going to pay for all that, why and how much? How am I going to organise money-raising operation, ie. sales?
10. Money issue # 2: will I make money on it? (It means: am I going to be financially motivated to sustain this site for a longer period that I can afford at a start-up?)

I think all these issues can easily go together with all the features listed in Kevin’s blog. But I think they are ”the most important things to include.”
 
Kevin predicts that ”there will be a site with related services that radically disrupts the news industry”.

Yes, I am sure there will be such a thing. I am just not sure if it will disrupt this industry just because of technology it uses and tools it provides.

Join the debate

What do you think would be most important in launching a news website nowadays and in the future? What is going to be the disruption force: just a technology or something else? What kind of innovation – social, organisational or business one – is needed to make the first ”iPod-style”, or ”MacBook Air” newspaper?