It’s over. The idea that the latest news article must be published at the top of a website, thereby giving priority to its visibility rather than to editorial precepts – in true blog style – seems to be agonising in Latin American online papers. The main regional papers are now putting hierarchical structures ahead of the architecture of their sites.
In Argentina, Clarin.com (one of the highest-traffic newspaper websites in the Spanish-speaking world), was the first to go for the sort of website architecture where “most recent” equals “most important.”
Clarin.com was able to transform this blog-style structure into an editorial criteria nobody else could emulate successfully, mainly because, well into the decade, few regional papers were putting their money into the Internet as strongly as Clarín was. As a consequence, there was no way other papers could have news-flows as powerful as Clarin.com’s. Even so, few newspapers had actually dared adopt such an architecture.
A few days ago, I spoke about the subject with Andrés Cavelier. Examples of blog-style presentation of information at high-traffic online Latin American papers can be counted on one hand. They have always been more of an exception than the standard, as occurs elsewhere.
The main papers in the region are playing a different game now. Save the recently re-designed Peru21.pe, part of the El Comercio Group (my employer), and which I personally believe to be beautifully designed, especially because it connects with the public who read this paper in the land of the Incas, few papers are going down the blog-style road.
About two years ago, Argentina’s Perfil.com went live with the reverse chronological design to present news stories, but it did so with a twist: although Perfil.com uses a blog-like hierarchical architecture, the most important story – always the top one in this kind of structure – is not necessarily the latest.
Instead, Perfil has always published dozens of stories a day, but reserves the top spots on the site for those it considers to be most important editorially-speaking. This means Perfil uses a design architecture the gives priority to the latest but does something else. In my opinion, this is difficult to use and hard to understand for a user. Sites should make up their mind. In my time at Perfil.com I tried, unsuccessfully, to push through some changes. I guess they will understand sooner than later, and will change.
A few weeks ago, I noted that Clarin.com is doing the same as Perfil. Previously, when visiting Clarin.com, a user could expect to see the latest news, the “most recent thing that happened”, at the top. The reading “terms and conditions” have now changed and there is no longer a fixed rule. The way articles are presented now varies constantly now. Sometimes, ones visits the site and finds the most recently published story on top, in line with what Clarín did for years. On other occasions, the top story is whatever is most important in the view of the paper.
Argentina’s La Nación, Colombia’s El Tiempo and Peru’s El Comercio are three examples of hierarchy in news-story importance that offer the best information and usability architectures in regional news sites.
In fact, almost all high traffic news sites in Latin America offer content based on editorial precepts and not necessarily on time of publication. Terra is probably one of the clearest examples in this sense.
Of course, examples abound of sites that present their contents based on importance while using architectures that are far from good.
Chile, a regional leader in all matters-digital (if not “the leader”), has a digital divide envied by its neighbours and enjoys deep-reaching and complex usability among even average users. But the main news websites do not stand out with their design, be it LaTercera, La Cuarta or El Mercurio. Montevideo’s El País would also fit into this group, as do the Venezuelan, Paraguayan and Bolivian online newspapers. Further north, Mexico’s El Universal appears to be one of the clearest and best organized in the region.
The era of the “blogger style presentation of information” in Latin American online papers seems to have ended. Many news sites simply know they need to offer more complex interactions and services to their users, and to make unparalleled efforts to offer information visually. I wouldn’t be surprised if in little time the main regional papers start integrating social network systems and deep-reaching personalization for users. Mainly because, they are starting to grasp that the age of “all things massive” has ended and audiences demand multiple offers of information and services. It would be impossible to meet these demands without having the right architecture to back these services.