This week I have the pleasure of giving a presentation on the importance of brain science to effective journalism practices at a gathering of community newspaper professionals. At this talk I will be highlighting an example or two of online news websites to illustrate some initial ideas of how I think online news could better reflect the organization of the brains’ of the audience and therefore do a much better job of making people smarter about the world around them. Personally, I think this could be a promising path toward online news content readers might actually be willing to pay for but that is a topic for a separate post. Right now I just want to toss out a quick example on this blog.
Check out the following website for the Lawrence Journal World. This illustrates the typical unrelated, grocery list approach to the design of online news websites. This approach completely ignores how the brain organizes information into what has been termed integrated memory networks consisting of nodes (or links) of related information. Somewhere along the line it appears to have erroneously been decided that listing a ton of unrelated bits of information in menu form is great for web design. This completely goes against the fundamental nature of the human brain and how it processes information. Some of our research in the PRIME LAB suggests that this approach may actually overload readers and keep them from becoming engaged in in-depth processing of website content. This could result in less time spent with the website as well as lower levels of learning from news.
I’m currently on the prowl for both good and bad examples of online news web design. I appreciate any examples you want to contribute to this conversation or even sites you’d like analyzed from a brain science perspective. Stay tuned for an update to this discussion early next week after the community newspaper conference.
Comments
I'd like to have this website, www.china.org.cn, analyzed
I happened to read your blog and am interested in your research. I work for a website, www.china.org.cn. We're trying to improve it and really appreciate it if you could offer any comment, suggestion and advice.
My analysis
Hi Karen. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to analyze your website. I hope others reading this post will look at your site and join the conversation. My over all analysis is that there are some places on your site where you are a little closer to organizing content in good ways for the brain and parts where your site falls into the same trap that many websites do that is completely against mirroring the way the brain processes information. First the good, as I scrolled down to the bottom of your main page you do a better job of packaging related content together into what I call a virtual associated memory network. Youn site does this pretty well once a reader clicks through to your world news page. Your front page like a lot of pages basically represents an information dump of a bunch of unrelated stories and links. It is this approach that is terrible for practicing great journalism, making people smarter about their world. Frankly speaking if I were in charge of buying advertisiing I would never want my ad appearing in this environment where it is competing against such a vast array of information that is little more than unrelated clutter. Ultimately for now the best advice I can give is to think about packaging stories and links into virtual associated memory networks both subject wise and visually in terms of layout. I am going to be experimentally testing the idea of organizing online news content into virtual associated memory networks this spring and will happily share results with you. I think online news needs to be complete redesigned with even new organizing labels for readers to engage the content through. For instance I am not sure top stories is a useful meaningful label for the brain. I think the only reason it is used is because of industry convention. I think the news websites that realize industry traditions and conventions aren't producing engaging get journalism are going to be the sites that not only better serve the public but are also going to be more profitable due to offering a better advertising environment and offering content readers might actually want to pay for. Email me if you'd like to discuss this further. I will help you as much as I possibly can.
Add Your Comment