Have you noticed that print media is coming to resemble web pages?

Consider the re-design of the Financial Times (first edition of new design on April 23rd). The front page demonstrates four common facets of web content. At the top, there are tabs that highlight key content that sits inside. Not everything can make it to the front page of course. These look like a cross between tabs on a web page (which typically represent different channels or recurring sections) and the slideshow concept. By slideshow, I mean bubbling-up programming from inside the site in a visual manner with some text summary. Slideshows are often implemented in the form of scrolling content vignettes. It’s the experience you find on AOL or Yahoo’s main page, NBA.com or even Rhapsody. If the FT front page were digital, you could just imagine the scroll from one tab to another drawing your attention to 3-4 items beyond the front page that the editors think is great copy.Lionel Barber, editor of the FT, said: ” improving the navigation of the newspaper we’re aiming to help our busy readers get more out of the paper so that they understand that the Financial Times is not only an informative and entertaining read, but also an essential business tool.”

The second commonality is the [left] sidebar of headline summaries. WSJ has been doing this forever, and so has the FT, but the new design increasingly resembles thumbnails. A good example of thumbnails is Google News. They do a wonderful job of giving you whole lot of headline news and integrating pictures where possible. A picture is worth a thousand words when you need to scroll dozens of possibilities before your impulse to click overcomes your quest for relevance.

The third idea that comes to mind is more subtle than the first two. What you typically find on a front page is very standardized treatment for all the articles on it. Sure some articles get more real estate and more enviable placement, but traditionally they all appear in the same font size and styles. The new FT mixes content layouts more radically than you find today on the cover of the NY Times or WSJ.

A final and more telling example of digital media setting the tone for print is the back-page of the FT, which now lists the most read and most emailed articles from the web site edition (in the prior day). Digital media alone can tell us what content an audience actually consumes. Sharing the degree of popularity in content is very valuable and informative. When I read a paper regularly, I’m curious to know what everybody else thought was so interesting. I may not care to read the stuff others find valuable, but I’m curious to know where the audience spends time on the aggregate. On the web, the idea of popularity has emerged as a pillar of web 2.0. It’s still in its infancy but already impacted print. For my money, it’s probably the biggest cross-over innovation to hit the scene.

I’d be curious to know what web designers think of all this. Of course, it’s not surprising that print and digital media will converge with each other. After all, it’s the web page that first looked to print for inspiration. Remember early web content homepages? Circa 1995, when the web page looked more like a magazine cover?

Filed under: User Experiences, Web Apps, Innovation, Traditional Media

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Tags: Financial Times, Front Page, Re Design, Web Page,