When major news organizations born in print revamp their digital homes, more is generally regarded as more.
With its new look website this week, Newsweek has bucked that trend, going for a clean look and feel that stands in sharp contrast to the feature jumble you get from Time.com, The New York Times and other massive news operations. Rather than try to jam as much on the homepage as possible, Newsweek gives you a mercilessly pared down version of world events, surrounded by white space, all in a clear attempt to live up to the tagline, “What Matters Most.”
It might be tempting to call this approach bloggy, as Editorial Director Mark Miller and others have done, but that couldn’t be more wrong. If Newsweek leadership really wanted to incorporate the best of the culture of blogging, they wouldn’t have drained the site of the personalities that provide Newsweek with what value that still remains: Its commentators. Strangely, there’s no preening of Newsweek’s crew of heavy-hitting authors until you get to the bottom of the page, where the likes of Fareed Zakaria, Howard Fineman, Daniel Gross, and Dan Lyons are listed in tiny type. It’s a curious decision in light of Newsweek’s strategic overhaul of a few years back to focus on opinion and commentary at the expense of newsgathering and, naturally, newsgatherers, hundreds of whom were laid off and bought-out.
Compare Newsweek’s new look to The Atlantic’s website, where voices like those of Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows and Ta-Nehisi Coates are front and center.
As I mentioned, the overarching focus is on simplicity. There’s just one featured story. As of this morning, it was a piece on why there wasn’t planning in place for a disaster the scale of the BP oil spill. (Good question!) But beyond that, the curation goes slightly awry. Below the feature runs a 10-item river of pieces that I suppose are meant to give us the important headlines of the day. I would, however, it’d be difficult to regard a feud between M.I.A. and Lynn Hirschberg as a top 10 story, on any day, even a Friday before Memorial Day, even a day on which those two individuals were the only two people left on the planet. Another piece is headlined, “In Defense of Teachers” — an unassailable point of view if there ever was one, even if it is unclear why it’s now relevant.
Then, at the bottom of the page, are three boxes that ask very newsweekly-type cover questions. “Who Needs Friends Like Facebook?” “What is Sarah Palin Building, and What Does It Mean?” “Can a Pill Help Women Reach Orgasm?”
Obviously, it’s unfair to judge a website’s content at one minute in time, but it’s clear early on that Newsweek.com needs some voice, especially when it’s so spare. And it is spare. No arguing that. In fact, you could argue there’s too little going on as New York’s Chris Rovzar convincingly does — especially when you consider that we’re still talking about a major news operations that should be bursting at the seams with news and analysis.
Or are we?
Newsweek is in terms of its footprint a shadow of its former self. And now it’s up for sale. The redesign seems like a push to add a digital raison d’etre to a once-revered media brand struggling to find its place in the world. While there are improvements on the aesthetic front, the sterile content approach doesn’t get it where it needs to go.
