USA Today has over 10 million monthly unique visitors, according to Nielsen NetRatings. Its redesign took five months (it is still in continuous development), 50 people, and did far more than revamp the graphic presentation (which is now less cluttered, with more scroll down and blank space). While remaining true to the traditional values of Gannett’s flagship newspaper.

News as a conversation: improves journalistic quality

An overview of the main changes, which all tend towards ‘news as conversation’:

_Users can register and create MySpace-like profiles. They can post photos, text, start a blog, link to other profiles, and communicate with other users.
_All articles and stories are open for comment.
_Small detail but enticing: reader comments scroll on the homepage’s top banner, linking back to the story they refer to.
_Users can vote and rank stories.
_Links to competitors’ live feeds.
_More user-generated content.
_New less cluttered design.
_New navigational and functional tools (most read, most-commented, most-recommended, or report abuse for a comment)

“There's a concept here called ‘network journalism’ -- the idea that reporting can drive readers and readers can drive reporting,” writes USAToday.com’s most popular blog, onDeadline, presenting the redesign. The concept of networked journalism was originally coined by Buzzmachine founder and new media proponent Jeff Jarvis.

Unsurprisingly, Jarvis seemed very enthusiastic about the redesign: “It’s a good design and all the steps are in the right direction.” Perhaps most important to him, Jarvis noted that “Much of this redesign is about such cultural change.”

Cultural change it is, such as embracing the boom of interactivity, Web 2.0, user-generated content and citizen journalism. Reader interaction and use of new media seems to be beneficial to newspapers (three in four editors believe so, see the Newsroom Barometer), so it’s a good thing USA Today, as an industry model and world newspaper leader, has embraced these new forms.

"I hate to use an old buzzword bingo term, but when you let readers initiate content on your website through blogs and discussion boards, instead of reacting to it through comments, you make the site far more sticky, and elicit much more loyalty to your site," says Robert Niles, editor of the Online journalism Review.

But what about the personal profiles and features, which resemble much more a MySpace, Facebook, or such social networking websites than a news site?

Social networking: improving journalistic quality?

“Forget the mall. Forget the movies. Forget school. Forget even AOL. If you're a teen in America today, the place to be is the social networking site MySpace, which has virtually exploded in the past few months,” wrote Janet Kornblum for USA Today in August 2006.

Less than a year after this article, USA Today is following that same route: one that seems more about explosive growth and audience figures than journalism and public enlightenment. Wilson doesn’t deny that the website’s new overall direction is also meant to attract traffic, revenue and play into social trends, but “the ultimate goal is to contribute to people’s understanding of the news, not to create an all-purpose social forum,” reminds Wilson.

Wilson insists that USAToday.com is not trying to become a cheap imitation of Facebook or YouTube. “This is not so much a chase of the latest media fads.”

So while comments are now open to all readers, they always link to news – rather than providing entirely unrelated discussion forums (forums have been created too, but for specific groups on particular issues).

“The mission remains much what it was when newspapers were the principle dominant news,” says Wilson.  “Newspapering is in our DNA”, he adds. Yet USAToday.com had to rethink itself, based on changing market trends and readers.

“What’s changed is the way in which information flows,” says Wilson, “none of us can expect to be the sole source destination for the majority of our readers.” So instead of trying to shut off from its competitors, the website offers links to them.

“Now anybody can author distribute and earn advertising revenue,” says Wilson. So instead of complaining about the corruptive effects of new media and citizen journalism, USA Today launched into networked journalism, using the input of citizen journalism yet channeling it into a news perspective. By scrolling news-relevant reader comments at the top of the homepage for example.

 
This is what makes the difference between rigid retrenchment and conciliatory innovation: simply adapting to, rather than resisting, social trends and readers’ evolving habits. A newspaper can be open to change while holding on to its philosophy.

In USA Today’s case, it may have created user profiles and adopted social networking traits, but these have not replaced the overwhelming primacy of news. News is still the main emphasis and purpose of the website, and most of the new Web 2.0 upgrades do in fact link to this purpose. USA Today has simply increased its range of offerings as a news website – one can hardly hold it accountable for trying to grasp new readers.

As long as these alternative offerings remain ‘at the service’ of the news delivery mission, there is little reason to fear they will hinder journalistic quality. Social networking can also actually improve news delivery: for example, readers can easily learn more about their favorite reporter and access their preferred columnist’s unread work in a few clicks, thanks to the personal profiles.

News first

So what is USAToday.com? Is it still a ‘newspaper website’?

“Well, I don’t know that we ever were a newspaper website,” answers Wilson. While many newspapers still consider a newspaper’s website to be just that, a newspaper’s website, Wilson considers it – and has so for a long time – as a medium standing on its own. Thus as a unique and complete platform to distribute news, which features an array of functionality and technology unavailable to print.

“We publish a newspaper, we have mobile platforms, we’re on the web. We’re a diverse media company,” says Wilson.

Whether your website should be an online news portal, a community network or a straightforward headline gatherer – and to what extent it is a little of each – , that is up to you, your readers and your market to decide. But most importantly, a news website must evolve… without forgetting the newspaper heritage that fostered its purpose and overall philosophy.

Good for the idealistic journalistic philosophy. But what about the business side? USAToday.com’s traffic has soared 21% since it was relaunched in March. Its number of registered users has more than tripled since then.

Souce: Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today