How print dominates the design of newspaper websites

Nuno Vargas of the University of Barcelona put a blunt question to the International Symposium on Online Journalism in April 2010: are online newspapers treating the web as a medium in its own right, or are they still anchored to the paper metaphor? His paper on how news and information is graphically presented online answered the second way.

The evidence came from the online editions of newspapers in Brazil, Argentina, Portugal and Spain. Across that set, Vargas found publishers still approaching the web from a paper-based concept rather than as a dynamic medium. What he did not find was an information architecture that was robust and flexible at the same time — a structure sturdy enough to hold a large daily news operation while still letting the reader move through it freely. The two qualities were being traded against each other rather than combined.

The demonstration that carried the argument was visual rather than statistical. Vargas showed front pages of newspaper websites, colour-coded to mark where multimedia actually appeared. Laid out side by side, the colour was the whole point: it showed how little of the page the web-native material occupied, and how much of the layout was inherited from the printed edition — the grid, the hierarchy of headlines, the assumption that a front page is a fixed arrangement of stories rather than something that can reorganise itself around what the reader wants.

His statement of the job was that the designer’s role is to make data visible to the user in the best way possible, and to leave the user deciding how to navigate it. By his own assessment the field was not there yet. The closing appeal was addressed to news outlets rather than to designers: stop transferring existing design ideas onto the web and accept that the work is being done in a new medium.

Two things kept the paper in circulation. It made a claim about design that could be checked by looking rather than by reading a table, and it made that claim across four countries at once, which turned a complaint about individual sites into a finding about a whole publishing habit. The argument that a news page should be built for its own medium rather than translated out of another one was still being made in the same terms years afterwards.