The scoop on the News Sentinel's redesign

by Georgiana Vines, a guest columnist for Scooping the News

My local newspaper, the Knoxville News Sentinel, has just redesigned its Web site, www.knoxnews.com, and I’m having to get used to it.

It’s has a black background and I’ve noticed some reader comments that it reminds them of a funeral. I’ve also had some trouble accessing stories. I thought this might be a problem with the Web site although I also wondered if the problem was with my computer.

I don’t think I’m in the category of not liking change. But I did have some questions about the new redesign so I sent Jack Lail, the newspaper’s director of news innovation, an e-mail with them. Jack and I have been colleagues. I’ve known him since 1984 when he came to the News Sentinel as a reporter. During his career in Knoxville, he’s been the city editor and the business editor. He started working on new media projects in 1994.

One of the things I learned from our exchange was that Knoxville was the third of the newspapers in the E.W. Scripps Co. to go online with its new redesign, which has been customized for the company’s newspapers.

Here’s Jack’s and my exchange:

Why is the redesign so dark and dreary?

We think the black makes photos pop out and the white text stand out, but the white text on black is mainly only in the "top stories" area of the Web site. This design is code-named "Asphalt" by E.W. Scripps' User Experience team and "BTop" (for black top) by the programming team so they have a sense of humor about it.

We did some usability testing this week using the Evansville (Courier & Press) site and the dark is not an issue. Many like it and the design fared well overall.

I'm finding slow reaction to it. It takes much longer to access a story. Have you had others complain about this?

We have had people complain and we've done quite a bit of measurement around that. We think the home page is about the same "weight" as the previous one was and we're seeing even shorter load times in many tests. But loading slower has been a complaint I've heard several times. It's somewhat of a mystery to me.

And then there was the fluke of the U.S. Senate race story that popped up yesterday that you and I have already had an exchange over. (This story that I wrote ran in 2006.) Have other stories popped up? Where do they come from, and why does this happen?

No, I was unable to get to the bottom of what happened there. A new process is monitoring Web requests to our Web servers in real time for a 24-hour period. Apparently, it has learned to hiccup.

Why did you do the redesign? How many redesigns have been done under your watch?

It had been two years since the last redesign and that's a long time given the speed at which the Internet is moving. There are a lot of trends, research and features we're trying to take advantage of.

This also is the most standardized Web design we've seen from E.W. Scripps. For the first time, the design (not the content) is about 80 percent controlled by Scripps and not changeable at the local level. This is allowing a rapid rollout of sites (one about every two weeks) and will allow updates to happen very quickly as well.

This increased standardization has been a major objective of Rusty Coats, head of the Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group (SING) based here in Knoxville. But there's still enough flexibility to be creative and innovative at the local level.

Oh, several redesigns. Here are the last four. On all of these, the design team has been led by Scripps' Herb Himes, who lives here in Knoxville, a very talented designer indeed.

And how did you realize that Web sites, Twitter, Facebook, etc., would be the future of journalism before so many other people did?

Like many things, I have no clue. They just looked fun and interesting to me. I also talked with Rusty Coats, to find out which Scripps newspaper will be next to go through the Web redesign. He said the Texas “properties” would roll out the first of September. The Texas papers are the Abilene Reporter-News, Corpus Christi Caller-Times, San Angelo Standard-Times and Wichita Falls – Times Record News.

Since I’m retired from full-time employment, I was really glad to get this update on what’s happening in the Scripps organization with its Web sites. I’m still a political columnist for the News Sentinel as a freelancer and people continue to associate me with the newspaper so I like to know what’s going on.

It’s also information I’ll use in the media management class I’ll teach in the School of Journalism & Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee this fall. I certainly want to be on top of the latest in journalism and feel in the online area the Scripps newspapers are showing the way.

Georgiana Vines started working for newspapers more than 40 years ago. In addition to serving as the editor of the El Paso Herald-Post, Vines held the position of national president of the Society of Professional Journalists from 1992-1993. To follow Vines on Twitter,click here. To read her columns for the Knoxville News Sentinel, click here.

Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of Vines and do not represent the views of Scooping the News.