The reading experience is one of the greatest assets a news organization can control. If they want to outsource that then so be it, but long term they are then relying upon a third party for their audience.

RSS should without a doubt always be an option for readers but news organizations should additionally work to provide the best, personalized reading experience they can for their users who wish to not use Google Reader, et al.

However, I do think their role would have to change slightly. I think this point is a place that would be ripe for greater editor engagement.

To point #1: Absolutely. I think the Guardian has done some really wonderful things to engage their community and inspire people to play with news content.

#2: I understand the importance of familiarity and comfort but at the same time what many large-scale news sites are doing in the online space just isn’t working. Having a design that your readers are familiar with is great but you’ll just be leaving the door open to an enterprising news startup who is not afraid to take risks with their presentation. The web allows for rapid iteration, unfortunately this doesn’t happen with news sites.

#3: True, the :visited property in CSS can do wonders here. However, that’s only good if all of my reading happens from one device, something that is less and less likely. If the news organization can have a personalized flow for content on their site then through my user account they could patch that same personal stream to my visits on an iPad, or mobile. There’s a lot more potential here than CSS rules allow for.

#4: I have a few ideas of my own. Perhaps in a future post.

1) The Guardian is one of the most open and sharing newspapers we have in the UK and there are numerous examples of people building on top of the product using their open platform:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform

2) Familiarity and traits are such an important factor when it comes to design. The style of print newspapers has not changed much since their beginning. Headlines, captions and content, all in a grid layout with justified text. These are proven ways of displaying this kind of information. The same is now beginning to apply to online newspapers too. They’ve found ways of displaying content which users are comfortable and familiar with so they have no reason to change unless usability testing shows otherwise. And if usability testing had shown otherwise, we’d be seeing something different today.

3) Your point about content you’d already seen is interesting. It makes sense for content to be chronologically ordered so older stories move around the page but most importantly all news sites that I use do so in a consistent manner. The behaviour of news randomly jumping from columns doesn’t hold true at least in my reading.

Regarding content that has already been read, this can be solved using CSS:visited. Unfortunately a lot of websites don’t use this for aesthetic reasons. And, surely people are familiar enough with bookmarking if they want to go back and read something later so content they have previously read becomes irrelevant.

4) Your final point about people not paying for the news online: I couldn’t agree more. I have absolutely no interest in paying to read news online in its current state. What could make me change my mind? I’m not sure

Information, misinformation and opinionated drivel are out there in abundance. There’s no shortage of ways I can engage with the content on the web. I don’t have an infinite amount of time however and I want people/organizations I trust to curate some of that information for me.