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Ineffective Visual Journalism on the Internet: An International Approach


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1 University of Malaga, Spain
     

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Conceptualizing and designing the news requires the best of art and information architecture. This article provides an overall view of new online patterns regarding news design by exploring how media websites display information on their homepages. The study analyzed ten worldwide references during the year 2013: bbc.co.uk (United Kingdom), clarin.com (Argentina), g1.globo.com (Brazil), repubblica.it (Italy), lemonde.fr (France), publico.pt (Portugal), ajw.asahi.com (Japan), theguardian.com (United Kingdom), elpais.com (Spain) and nytimes.com (United States). It can be concluded that editorial website design is both stable and obsolete: major trends in today's web design of online news media date from approximately 2006; the layouts are not innovative, and online newspapers have rendered the front page concept superfluous by creating "tombstoning" homepages. Before its redesign in 2014, the New York Times was considered one of the densest and most cluttered editorial sites on the Web. According to our data, its homepage was 22473 pixels in size, and contained more than two hundred news items. However, the size of the homepage or the number of news items it featured did not correlate with time spent by users on the website.

Keywords

Web Design, Online News, Visual Journalism, Internet, Participation.
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  • Ineffective Visual Journalism on the Internet: An International Approach

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Authors

Maria Bella Palomo
University of Malaga, Spain

Abstract


Conceptualizing and designing the news requires the best of art and information architecture. This article provides an overall view of new online patterns regarding news design by exploring how media websites display information on their homepages. The study analyzed ten worldwide references during the year 2013: bbc.co.uk (United Kingdom), clarin.com (Argentina), g1.globo.com (Brazil), repubblica.it (Italy), lemonde.fr (France), publico.pt (Portugal), ajw.asahi.com (Japan), theguardian.com (United Kingdom), elpais.com (Spain) and nytimes.com (United States). It can be concluded that editorial website design is both stable and obsolete: major trends in today's web design of online news media date from approximately 2006; the layouts are not innovative, and online newspapers have rendered the front page concept superfluous by creating "tombstoning" homepages. Before its redesign in 2014, the New York Times was considered one of the densest and most cluttered editorial sites on the Web. According to our data, its homepage was 22473 pixels in size, and contained more than two hundred news items. However, the size of the homepage or the number of news items it featured did not correlate with time spent by users on the website.

Keywords


Web Design, Online News, Visual Journalism, Internet, Participation.

References