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On 20 Oct 96 at 9:46, colliera@isaiah.csps.com wrote:

> I thought that was interesting. Have we all reached some sort of
> consensus that an online "newspaper" should look (and navigate and
> browse) like a paper? 

I sincerely hope not. Note that the New York Times and Wall Street 
Journal are atypical newspapers. They are more valued outside their 
geographic market than within and in most cases the secondary buy of 
their customers. Patterns developed from their experiences would be 
hard to generalize to newspapers other than, perhaps, the Washington 
Post, Washington Times and Christian Science Monitor.

My new favorite phrase -- geographically niche products, meaning
local newspapers -- face an entirely different set of challenges.
There's no reason why they should fritter away their valuable name
and, to some extent, appearance. However, if they are to grow (or,
in some cases, survive) on the web, they probably need to also
develop distinctly different sites, repurposed out of their
traditional content to appeal to a new niche. Something Dom is very
familiar with, Packer Plus from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, is a
good example. Indianapolis' basketball and motor sports sites are two 
more, as is Cox/Atlanta's Fast Ball, etc.

As to navigation within a site, that really is a different matter 
altogether. As several of us seemed to agree at this weekend's SND 
convention in Indy, newspapers are *more* interactively designed than 
most typical online sites. Typically, in a newspaper, you are never 
more than one "click" away from content, whereas online, to borrow 
Bill Skeet's metaphor, we strive to be no more than three clicks 
away.

The newspaper design scheme, with multiple entry points, is not 
really much different from Leah Gentry's deconstruction/reconstruction 
model of nonlinear storytelling.

The problem is not in making a site *look* like a newspaper. It's in 
making it *act* like a newspaper.
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                  N E W S L I N K
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   Eric K, Meyer          http://www.newslink.org
   managing partner       4,000 media links & more
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