This week USAToday.com revealed a new look and a serious upgrade to its features. Along with Web 2.0 standards like article tagging, tabbed browsing, and more white space, what you'll really notice are the new community components.
In a clear acknowledgement on the shifting balance between newspaper-as-authority and newspaper-as-content-curator, USAT offers:
- In-screen content feeds from other sources
- Reader comments highlighted against every article
- Digg-style voting for popular stories, with a directional stock indicator
- Photo uploads from citizen journalists
- User profile pages
- Recommend stories or comments to other readers
While they have clearly taken some pages from the New York Times playbook, the site goes even further in trying to redefine what a newspaper website can be. In a letter to readers, the editorial staff lay out their ambitions clearly:
"[The redesign] is a mission recast for an era in which readers are inundated with information, have little allegiance to a single news source, struggle to assess the credibility of what they read and have the capacity to share their own insights with a wide audience."
While USAToday has never been considered a paper of record, it's very significant that America's most-read paper is seeking to democratize news. When it comes to information consumption, the user is more in control than ever.
Misha Cornes
Strategists & Planners