USATODAY relaunched its website yesterday with a parade of new features that will add a significant social layer to the site that wasn’t there before. The website is no longer a simple hose spouting news at readers. It has become a full on social network, integrating user generated content in intelligent and interesting ways.
The list is sort of ho-hum at first - bigger pictures, better tabs, etc. But then there are a whole bevy of social feature as well. A few of the features are below. A full list is here. They’ve also integrated various Ajax components to the site - nothing over the top, but enough to make the interface a lot more pleasant to navigate.
New Features:
- User Comments: Every article now has user comments.
- Most Popular: Read articles based on popularity rather than in the order assigned by USATODAY editors. Articles are ranked by Most Read, Most Commented, Most Recommended (see below) and Most Emailed.
- Digg-Like Article Voting: Click “recommend” on an article and the vote tally increases by 1. Highly recommended articles appear under the “Most Popular” tab.
- Profile Pages: Registered users have their own page that aggregates their comments, recommended articles and other content.
Unlike some of the tepid experiments tried by other major publications, these show an intelligent commitment to building community at the site. Steve Rubel says they haven’t gone far enough, and suggest additional features. I don’t disagree, but this is a big commitment already by one of the largest mainstream media publications in the world. Let’s hope the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others follow soon.
Update: Allen Stern has a good video overview of the new features.
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kudos to this major media player realizing and implementing this stickyness to their site
I will have a heart attack it the NYT ever goes this route. They charge five bucks to read an article that’s a week old.
Micheal, I am really glad to you have highlighted USA Today’s new web features and their commitment to buidling a user community. I have been a long-time user of usatoday.com, and I am thrilled with the fact that users can now post comments and that articles are ranked by popularity. I think their adoption of Ajax is also very cool!
Monster improvement I think. I’m sure if NYT went this route Amy, we’d have to pay $10 to use it I’m sure.
This is interesting but I have a feeling it wont be as big as most think. I feel a blog post coming on…
Nice feature set, but poor design. I guess I should be happy with what we got, and maybe they will redesign in the future.
Sounds pretty cool. I’ll check it out.
This is absolutely fantastic and disruptive. Great job USAtoday. One of these major news organizations HAD to step up, and not only did USAToday do it, they did it right.
I agree with Ethan: Very nice features, but the design is dull.
I wish that a major or even a minor news site in Israel would be so social as USAToday or NYT.
It’s nice to see someone in the newspaper business finally taking some chances. I don’t like everything I see, but I like the fact that they’re taking a risk and doing something different.
I saw this post right after I finished writing about how newspapers can move out of the fishwrap business and into the knowledge business:
http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/.....-fishwrap/
Wow, an old-timey newspaper does something cool on the web, and it’s USA TODAY, of all people. I’m genuinely surprised that McPaper were the first ones to figure this idea out.
I hope it works, because I want more papers to do this, instead of dying off.
How would this help USA Today sells more paper? There are so many sites provide all these…
If I’m not mistaken, the L.A. Times once experimented with UGC, but it didn’t work out that well, did it?
Just as a follow up (I have a full write up on my blog), the reactions aren’t that positive judging from the comments:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/c.....PageReturn
Looks like they simply hacked in a white label solution from http://www.pluck.com.
I wish they had also included a ranking system for the article plus the recommend.
Mike,
I’m surprised you didn’t mention this is powered by pluck.com…..
cman
Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
It is good to see that there is a newspaper that hasn’t just rolled over. Newspapers have value, but they have needed to get into the game of the internet by doing something other than just publishing their content online.
Kudos to USA Today.
FYI - in case anyone is interested, I just did a video review and commentary (about 10 minutes):
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....y-relaunch
I see some pros, and more cons.
#13 Yohay - yes, they did this about 60 days ago, check out my video review of the lame LATimes start page:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ot-awesome
The key to all of this is that just adding comments does not make the site web 2.0 or social. It’s about thought processes as well.
Hooray for USA today. Open threads on every major story. That’s a revolution by itself.
Between Reuters saying it wants to build a social network for stock pickers, the BBC coming to Youtube and, now, USA Today taking the lead for newspapers, we’re at some kind of major tipping point.
Hmm. I had never read USAToday on the web. And after just having my first experience with their new look I can honestly say I’m not impressed. Sure, the colors are nice, and the news is indeed there, but there are things that I just don’t want to bother with: such as registering to comment, and navigating through the ads and similar color combinations to find content.
I’ll stick with my MSNBC.
Good call. This is a significant change and a good indication that legacy media isn’t as stubborn about the new web as they have been. It remains to be seen if mom and pop will start blogging and interacting with the enthusiasm of Tech Crunchers.
I actually like the new design, it’s really hard to do a site like that where you have tons of information that must be everywhere every time in order for the reader to find it. About the new features: nothing extraordinary, but it is good to see big newspapers adopting the social aspect in a much better way than they did.
However the old users of the USAToday are not happy with it, just below the welcome page, the existing users are saying it is the worst remodel effort and complaining plenty. Maybe they will change over in time. This is an excellent addition by USAToday, I think they are a pioneer in the newspapers. The Web design can be easily sorted out, main thing the users should like such digg voting type systems.
Bravo! *Stands up and applauds* =)
Chris - some users always complain about redesigns. If they’re still complaining in a month, it means something.
Mike - many users who complain today just give up complaining in a month. Doesn’t mean they like it anymore than they do today.
I do agree that change always takes time to get used to.
And of course, they won’t turn it back anyway!
Know what would be great… some usatoday widgets! Let me take the parts I like of UT, mash it with the other things I like, and stick them on the start page I want to.
just an idea!
While I think this effort is a step in the right direction, I still can’t shake the feeling that the actual content will continue to be advertainment. I never really looked at the old site, but the new design makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. As soon as I see punch the monkey and dancing clown advertisements, I have to believe that they remain the organ of disinformation that they always were.
What’s reallly interesting is that USA Today regular readers seem to hate the new site. Is it something only a geek could love?
It is really “bravo”. I looked at business, tech categories. It is really good, I like it.
Atleast, this would encourage (rather force) other newspapers to follow the same and some interesting things will happen in the online news…Good for the readers.
Thanks for the post, Mike!
I think there is an opportunity for an enterprising startup to create a big business creating a system that allows traditional publishers with no online presence (or a 1-way web presence) to move to a model like USAToday is doing.
Think of your local newspaper. They have virtually no web presence. The system would have the following features: an online traditional article publishing system, built-in seo features, the “community building” features, and a better system than Google Adense which allows them to serve ads based on content AND user profile data collected through cookies and partnerships. If you built or mashed-up a system like this, you could build a great business.
Here’s what would be the ultimate - publish stories online a few hours before pressing the print edition, and allow users to push stories up to the front page. That way editors couldn’t bury stories.
The Washington Post, for instance, used to regularly print scandalous front-page ‘news’ that talked about Iraq having weapons programs - all the info was from named and unnamed ‘government officials, a CIA asset named ‘curveball’, etc. The Mike Allen pieces that debunked all the neocon claims of WMD existence in Iraq were all buried in the back of Section A - with A22 coming to mind. So, sensational and false allegations on the front page, hard factual reality-based reporting on page A22. That was up to the editors to make that call. If it was up to citizens, we might not be in Iraq right now.
This is definitely the future of news. And I like it.
I don’t see it. Their content is anti-community: wide breadth, shallow depth. Communities focus around narrow breadth, deep depth. Glad they added the features, but features don’t create communities.
Features look great but as Gzino says communities focus around narrow breadth and deep guage. USA Today would be better off creating niche channels feeding off the main site, channels in which the communities can develop and thrive.
Appreciate the encouragement from Mike and others. This is just the start of what we hope will be a continuous development process. The purpose of this initial redesign is to delivering a quicker, more informed news report by combining our own reporting with surveillance of other news sources and contributions from readers. With time, there will be refinements in the design and plenty of new features. In the long run, though, the real test will not be whether we can incorporate the latest social media tools, but how we use these tools to transform the way we practice journalism and serve our readers. The hard work begins today. Kinsey Wilson, Executive Editor, USA TODAY.
Great overall concept, but gzino has a really good point. The main problem with this is that USA Today isn’t the NY Times or the Washington Post or the LA Times or even the Wall Street Journal. Because of USA Today’s position as “America’s newspaper,” it is often the newspaper equivalent of a Shirley Temple — goes down easy without much bite. When a newspaper with the best writers and more focused viewpoints follows suit, I think the potential for interesting thread discussions would be huge. And hopefully, the USA Today experiment will be enough of a success that this concept will spread.
Also, it would be interesting if newspapers could incorporate a Netflix-style method of informing you of the “most popular” articles. That is, Netflix will recommend films based on recommendations of *other people like you.* So if you don’t really care to read about Dwayne Wade’s latest exploits, you wouldn’t have to; same thing if you wanted to navigate straight to sports instead of world market reports, etc.
This site does look good.
I am betting the people who are bitching on the site are the folks who call the help desk 20 times a day. The same people who really don’t have a clue how to operate the computer, much less browse the internet.
From a design perspective, it’s sub-standard. Scanability is non-existent, with no quick way to digest the page at a glance. On closer inspection, I discover the dynamic lead on the left, which has a staggered load that I have to wait for. The colored squares mean nothing to me, unless I study the top menu and their relationships and only then after regular usage will I remember them. Next to the headlines, readers can vote, but don’t need to be logged in or even read the story? What’s the point of that I have to wonder? Kudos to them for embracing new web practices, but as with 99 percent of the web, the design leaves a lot to be desired.
I thought this was a helpful article too. I love reading USA Today online but always hated the old format.
Mike - didn’t I see you at NY Times/Khoi Vinh’s presentation at FOWA where he said NY Times plans to roll out their own social features in the next couple of months? While I think USA Today’s initiative/NY Times plans are encouraging, they miss a big point. Internet users don’t want to be owned by one source and they turn to multiple sources to get their news. The Internet and search made that a lot easier, undermining the traditional media business model. Most readers are not going to have the time or inclination to belong to multiple social news networks. They need to be able to move between and interact among all of their sources with ease with a neutral platform that rewards those who create best of breed content.
They added social features but forgot to hire *designers* to work on the site, it looks absolutely terrible. Does anyone actually think it looks as good as the recent work done for NYTimes.com or New York Magazine?
the ability to leave comments on the website is not there for all pages.
the web site is soooo slowwwww………..(i would suggest akamai or similars)
Guy
i prefer a single fixed price/song - just like apple’s
why should popularity of a song affect price/download?
doesn’t make sense to me
http://www.ppt-to-flash.net