Big changes continue at the Merc
Matt Mansfield, guru of visuals and more at The San Jose Mercury News, mentioned in passing this weekend that the Merc’s ‘rethinking’ project is shifting gears, “up and blogging in a major way” with a redesigned web presence.
Matt writes:
We’re sharing our ideas because we want people to know why we’re doing all this. We’d like guidance on our progress. And we aim for this process to be wide open, in the best spirit of innovation that’s made Silicon Valley a leader around the world.
Naturally, that led to a series of questions. And Matt was full of answers…
Q. Transparency to the nth degree?
A. We want our rethinking process to be as transparent as possible. And we wanted to begin sharing with our staff and our community the ideas we’re considering, why we’re doing it, and the progress we’re making.
We look at the news organization as public property. Everyone has a stake in the decisions.
To that degree, we want this process to be a conversation. One of the philosophies that has guided us has been the notion that the solutions to the problems facing newspapers won’t be found inside the walls of our offices. If they were, we would have found them long ago. So as we proceed, we want to talk about the issues … and we know that doing that starts with being very open about what we’re considering.
Matt Mansfield in a Society for News Design board
meeting last month in Boston. Photo by Steve Dorsey.
—Q. Any particular reason for the upgrade? When did you make the change?
A. We felt like the old blog site was a little too cluttered, and we were looking for better sharing, social networking and aggregation tools to help jump start conversation. We know more than half of the folks who will read and interact with us will do it on their own terms. We’re close to posting a guide for developers so they can help us hack around on our ideas, too. Don’t be surprised if the site keeps changing (like my buddy Robb Montgomery says: “always in beta”) as we grow the conversation. That kind of change, just like it’s been for VisualEditors is good because the addition of tools shows that you’re responding quickly to what the audience needs.
Q. I understand changes are already creeping into the paper. Can you tell me about any of them?
We have already made changes. The biggest one was about a month ago when we took many of our features sections and melded them into a single daily section, which includes the gamut of “life” here. That means you will find food + wine coverage next to arts + entertainment coverage.
It’s a way to do two things: save some money on newsprint and reduce reader guilt around the number of sections we send out every day. So far so good. But it’s likely to change again. See how this process is iterative?
Q. Will there big a big day in which you unveil a huge design change? Or do you still plan to do most things incrementally?
A. I wish I could flip a switch and make it all perfect. Any major print change will come in a single week, as we did recently when we changed our features coverage. That means if we, say, try to move to a radical three-section paper, that will all happen in a given week as we transition out of the old model into a newer one. Do we know when that will be specifically? Not yet, but it won’t happen until January of 2008 because we have commitments through the end of the year that would be difficult to extract ourselves from.
That said, the online changes are already happening and continue to happen. We’re open to a rolling roll-out because the imperative of the market demands it … and because we know that users of online media are used to being beta testers. We’re pretty sure they will tell us when we have it wrong.
You can find this stunning example of newspaper redesign transparency here.
Find an article in Condé Nast Portfolio about the San Jose rethink project here.
Best wishes, Matt, for a successful project. We’ll keep watching.
November 5th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Interesting stuff. But I can’t help but think of the ‘Simpsons’ episode where Homer’s half-brother who owns a car manufacturing company asks Homer to design a car for the ‘every man’ and it ends up a complete flop. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Merc’s ideas are very forward-thinking and can (and probably will) result in an outstanding new product. But that ‘Simpsons’ episode (and my experience of working at a MediaNews paper) nag at the back of my mind.
November 5th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
I love “The Simpsons” myself, but … I hope we’re trying to help focus the organization. We’ll see how it turns out. There’s certainly no magic answer. We are looking for things that will resonate in this market. We know we cannot and will not be able to reach everyone. So stay tuned.