Florida Today and The Guardian distinguished for their website
Each week, Jack Schafer, Slate, tries to assess the readibility of major English speaking newspapers websites. Last week, he was incredibly negative about the electronic editions of NYT, LAT and WaPo. This week, he is in better mood: "the electronic editions of Florida Today and The Guardian are changing my thinking. The future of newspapering might be closer than I thought. On the surface, Florida Today and the Guardian are very similar to their electronic edition genre-mates. Both display PDF images of each print-edition page; both allow readers to page through the "paper" with mouse clicks, skip forward to a desired section, or zero in on a subject with the search function. What sets Florida Today and the Guardian apart from the pack is the way they preserve the basic navigation principles of a daily newspaper.
Most electronic editions swamp the screen with a PDF of a newsprint page or two. But Florida Today and theGuardian put a PDF of the page the left and a list of HTML headlines from the page on the right. Click the story on the PDF page and copy renders promptly on the right in either PDF form or HTML, depending on how you set your preferences. It hardly sounds revolutionary, but displaying the newsprint page next to the enlarged stories makes a huge contextual difference."
Source: Slate
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Jack Schafer has an interesting piece at Slate about electronic newspapers. He especially likes Florida Today and the Guardian for their usability. They are worth looking at as are the Washington Post and New York Times demos. Downloading the entire... Read More
Jack Schafer has an interesting piece at Slate about electronic newspapers. He especially likes Florida Today and The Guardian for their usability. They are worth looking at as are the Washington Post and New York Times demos. Downloading the entire... Read More
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