April 9, 2004, 12.49am • 20 comments » • 2,392 Views

Heralding a new approach

How long has this been so good? Scotland’s The Herald has had a remarkable makeover, adding a navigational aesthetic I’ve only seen in one other place.

It’s namesake, The International Herald Tribune, acknowledged some time ago that many readers of newspapers’ sites like to turn the “page” - so it let them.

Even though the web is a radically different medium, and newspapers have shifted mindset well enough to present their stories as one long column of copy, stories on IHT.com are presented as multiple newspaper-like columns. Clicking any text on the right or left column will dynamically turn the page in the corresponding direction. This is carried out instantly and not whilst having to wait for a new page to be loaded up.

Now, the Scottish title has followed the global player’s lead. Navigation of stories on The Herald’s site operates in exactly the same way, although the space for the three columns is condensed thanks to a left-hand navbar and right-hand adbar. This makes the story columns themselves shorter, more closely resembling newspaper story presentation.

It’s all thanks to a dynamic rendering engine virtually identical in function to IHT.com’s. With both sites, readers even can increase or decrease font size on the fly for easier reading and turn the “page” to the next columns without the aesthetic disjuncture of flicking to a new web page - it’s all on the fly. The one crucial difference being that, with the IHT, you can choose to display stories in the typical one-long-column layout if you so wish. Not so with The Herald, which is multi-column or nothing.

Okay, so it’s hardly whizz-bang interactivity or participatory journalism. Indeed, the content is still shovelled and you could say it’s actually harking back to newspaper layout techniques, trying to make the the web into a dead tree. But I think it demonstrates that there is still evolution and room for competing approaches in how textual news is represented on the web. Perhaps it’s not a forgone conclusion that every story will come as a linear, top-down, single column?