Tag Archives: Media

Getting there early to be on time: Meeting insurance

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One of the things I notice working to find out the views of others, working to publicise their work, is that you end up hanging around a lot.

This is even more prevalent when those I’m trying to interview are not quite keen on being the subject, on having a microphone under their nose, on me recording their words. There’s an interesting phenomenon that occurs when you’re talking to someone in a journalistic capacity which I see this all the time; you’re having a marvelous and stimulating conversation with a subject, getting lots of really useful information from them. Normally this takes place in the couple of minutes before you decide to start recording. It’s part of the warm-up process so that you can build a form of rapport with the interviewee. They say something very concisely or something a bit unexpected and you say to them ‘Hey, that was really interesting, can I just get you to say that again on tape?’ I ask them the question once more, we kind of run through our conversation again, but the second time it’s boring. People HATE being interviewed and I think often just the concept of having a mic in their face is incredibly off-putting.

I often try and really go past that level of discomfort with subjects and put the microphone so close in that they can’t really get away from it. If it’s too close to really be able to perceive it properly, as in if it’s so close to them that it’s out of their line of sight, people relax a little bit. It’s like a journalist’s blind spot. People end up not noticing the mic, or at least they end up feeling less uncomfortable with it.

But that doesn’t change anything for the subjects who rearrange, who move the location around, or who suddenly discover they’re pulled away. It wastes my time so much. That said, it’s often worth waiting around because those people who squirm are those who give depth of sound. They often have the most raw and real contributions. Waiting around gets good results. When people approach you, I’ve always found, the results are often near useless. Someone spotting you on the street asking about topic X, realises they have something to say about it too, often has a whole lot of five minutes to tell you nothing you want to use.

Rearranged appointments is never ideal, not only because you’ve spent that time to get ready and prepped for the initial occasion but because it no doubt screws up the rest of your timetable. Bang goes your study hour. On the other hand, the one way I’ve found to almost guarantee that your interview won’t be delayed or postponed is to turn up long before the arranged time. If you’re there before they even go into their preceding meeting there is little chance they’ll forget: you’re already waiting in the foyer. So when I have a 09:00 appointment, getting there at 08:30 might sounds like being desperately keen but, bring a book, and you have a much higher chance of keeping the date. On the plus side, planning arriving early allows you to sort out problems like the interview subject being at a different location, forgetting the date or such like. Those minutes are your insurance that you’ll keep to your plans, and it works.

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The Guardian Tidies its Online House: A Digital Redesign

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As part of a string of redesigns within the Guardian Media Group, Thursday May 10th was host to the Guardian’s ‘Network Homepage’ redesign. From looking like this [as of 10 September 2006]:

It looks like this [as of 12 May 2007]:

The design is interesting because of the way it compares to other popular websites of the moment such as Flickr and Google, as well as how it compares to other newspapers. Because of the content-driven nature of a newspaper website it’s most useful to compare it to other newspapers but also to refer to what people are saying about the design of websites. My three examples will be The Guardian (pdf link), The New York Times (pdf link), and Le Monde’s (pdf link) homepages. I took screenshots of all three websites on the evening of May 10th so as to compare like with like. It’s not the stories themselves that are of interest, but the way they’re shown.

The Guardian’s website is evolving in a way that they claim is geared towards allowing greater flexibility of content and increasing use of images.

…It offers the most immediate improvement for users and advertisers, making the site more accessible and allowing us to showcase a wider range of content. The wider pages allow us to feature more news and different, dramatic layouts as the news agenda changes throughout the day – we will not be wedded to the fixed story and picture positions of more conventional sites – and we want to offer users the best possible gateway into the full depth of our award-winning content.
Guardian Unlimited – The Next Step

As others have noted [eyefall.co.uk: 'Guardian Website Gets (Partial) Redesign'], the redesign doesn’t go any deeper than the frontpage. Though the Travel section of the website has already redesigned in a similar fashion, that is currently the only area where the design has permeated the frontpage. This can be a bad thing, in that it creates a heterogeneous style that can be slightly disconcerting. A user going from the homepage to an older (deeper) layer of content finds that the site has an inconsistent style and navigation style. On the other hand this can create a stepping stone for transition to the new design. You don’t want, in any case, to alarm users to an extent that they hardly realise they’re visting the same website they’ve long frequented. Changes have to be within the realm of the expected.

‘Web 2.0′ is the phenomenon and the idea that’s sweeping through all internet businesses of late. As David Pogue mentions this week in his New York Times technology-focused email, Web 2.0 is largely defined as “Web sites whose contents are supplied by us, the people”. The Guardian’s website and websites have been moving towards a collaborative and inclusive approach for a long time. With their Comment Is Free site they encourage reader contributions and discussions. This hasn’t changed in the new site design though perhaps the commenting will go even deeper in further revisions. Whether the Guardian has really adopted the philosophy of user-created content as sites like the Huffington Post has, with ‘share/comment’ and ‘Quick Read’ links everywhere, they have absorbed much of the style used in this new generation of site. The Guardian is of course, at heart, a newspaper. As Lynn Chang mentions in her blog post ‘The Web 2.0 Style‘, the Web 2.0 features can be summed up quite easily and often demonstrated on the Guardian Website:

  • Center layout system – spreading down for scrolling rather than locked to a single page. With the advent of scrolling mice and trackpads it’s just as easy for someone to scroll down a page as look at a little box of content. Plus, more fits in.
  • Increased Font size. Content that’s important gets a step up in status by getting a larger font. Smaller stories or niche markets have much smaller or even greyed out type. On the left is the font size of a general headline before the redesign, while on the right, the new size:
    guardian redesign
  • Widespread use of whitespace. Whitespace lets the eyes rest from the clutter of links and news and ads. See any page from 1999: eyes need ‘breathing room’ of space that essentially isn’t used. But by not using the space, the content that is present has a boosted capacity for impact:
    guardian redesign
  • Gradients. Not found on the Guardian website (yet) these are most popular with more interactive, user-content sites.
  • Strong and contrasting colours that take advantage of whitespace and draw the eye:
    guardian redesign
  • Rounded Corners stop graphics look like they’re from a 1960s technology magazine by always being boxed in by lines and squares. Rounded = soft = natural = approachable = friendly = à la mode:
    guardian redesign
  • 3D Icons. Not found on the Guardian website (yet) these are most popular with more interactive, user-content sites and ecommerce sites like Apple Inc’s website.
  • Oversized Text:
    guardian redesign

Other aspects that one will notice of the Web2.0 style, not mentioned specifically by Chang include:

  • Prevalence of Multimedia content taking advantage of the explosion in freely available video and audio content such as podcasts:
    guardian redesign
  • Search. The site itself and the wider web:
    guardian redesign
  • RSS Feeds. Trying to get visitors to view your content even if they don’t want to see the homepage. It’s the news without all the layouts and (often) pictures. Just the news, raw = very popular.
    guardian redesign
  • Accessibility. Like RSS, if you can get a reader, any way possible, that’s better than no reader. Interactive, rolling, self-updating content draws readers in and makes a website appear more dynamic. Perfect example being G24: Print Your Own PDF:
    guardian redesign

Chang finishes off by mentioning some characteristics one won’t find on Web 2.0 sites:

…Here are a few things you’ll definitely want to avoid when designing your next-gen web site:

  • Blinking graphics such as animated GIFs
  • 100 percent Flash web sites
  • Visible tables
  • Websites without CSS

What The Guardian hasn’t got enough of, or is lacking is:

  • Advertising, other than for itself. Even with my numerous adblocking software tricks the NYTimes and Le Monde’s websites manage to serve me up numerous advertising images. Often unobtrusively animated, these are of big brands, not just advertising itself as the Guardian often resorts to. Sadly this often just highlights their lack of major advertisers. What is their sales department up to?guardian redesign
  • Differentiation between advertising and content. Nobody will meaningfully click on advertising if it blends in with content. And if they do so by mistake users will become annoyed with the lack of clarity and begin to distrust or resent the content provider. Currently sponsorships and contests look too similar to real Guardian content.guardian redesign
  • At-a-glance news. The general font size is too large. While the NYTimes throws up a load of links towards the bottom of its page, at least on the left hand side of the page there is a long list of (small) links to other sections. guardian redesign
  • Links to premium content. The NYTimes made the decision with its Times Select service. The Guardian is one of very few newspapers that does not maintain a premium subscriber only section. An interesting difference between it and the competition. By NOT having a premium section it may gain readers but premium content does often denote quality. It is still too hard, whether premium content or not, to learn about services like the Guardian Digital Edition. It is bizarre that this isn’t more clearly publicised. guardian redesign
  • Dynamically updating content from other sites or other sections of the site. Blogs, most read lists, incoming comments, rolling (not scrolling which is impossible to read) news, live updating of top stories etc.guardian redesign

At the moment The Guardian’s website is looking fantastic, but at the same time, with the recent redesign of The Times’s website and an increasing internet user literacy the site can no longer look like an unprofessional attempt at running a news organisation. With standard font sizes that are too large, unnecessary use of images that don’t add to the page and a shocking lack of quality advertisers, there is still need for tinkering.

The three example websites can be downloaded in their current state from (~4 MB) PDF links:

Comments, as always, are open. Says Emily Bell:

…to cheer myself up I went through the email inbox where it turns out the positive and negative are absolutely evenly balanced – but those who don’t like it are certainly keen to express distaste in a lengthier form.

Here’s a nice one: “Dear Guardian, very very nice indeed. A major improvement and best of all, I didn’t even think the old one had problems” from nux, and a not-so-nice-one: “Your words about the changes are for me a pompous world salad, bereft of meaning. I pass – disappointed” from Lesley Honeyman, whose eloquence has however at least given me a new title for a blog: pompouswordsalad.com
Guardian Unlimited: Your Emails and Comments

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Jane Fonda Promotes Her New Movie with A Kiss

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As part of going on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central to promote the 11 May release of her new film ‘Georgia Rule‘, Jane Fonda managed to put host Stephen Colbert in a jam by getting far more up close and personal than he’d expected, leaving him saying “this is not how I expected this interview going!” The video, below:

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French Presidential(e) Elections

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The sneaky ‘e’ is a wink to Madame Ségolène Royal who is the Parti Socialiste‘s candidate. She’s been a bit creative with her campaign by appending an ‘e’ (signifying the feminine form) to the word président, creating ‘présidente’. This is notable because président is normally a masculine word, and because everyone is making a huge fuss about how she’s a woman. Early in the campaign (which only officially started today) she was asked, ‘But who will take care of the children?!’ France may be more progressive than some states but in other ways it seems as progressive as a glacier. They’re as chauvinist as any rabid Republican in the US, but fiercely proud of their liberties, equalities and fraternities, as long as that doesn’t include women being paid equally to men, equal treatment of immigrant groups and so forth. It’s a funny place; I love it.

At around 10:30 last night I was randomly channel surfing and came across a promo for the news of TF3 (Télévision France 3). Because I was in that exhausted phase that I get for a while after a really good but hard run, I decided to wait around for this news program. While waiting for it, rather unexpectedly, I was presented with 15 minutes or so of political ads for the various Presidential candidates. I read the newspapers here a lot so actually catching these things was fascinating; even more so because I’ve been taking a class on Political Communication in which the professeur would each week give us a summary of the campaign and often show clips of the high profile interviews of each (main) candidate. A couple things that I thought of on seeing these ads:

  • At times the fringe parties do themselves no favors. They use their allotted time to show themselves chatting with ‘representative’ citizens on the street. This doesn’t work because combined with people talking in odd accents and too fast, fast cutting of the film, the subtitles (show for all candidates) and the possibility of picture-in-picture to make room for someone signing the broadcast, there’s too much going on. It looks disorganised. Viewers don’t care about having to watch other ‘ordinary’ people question a politician: they’re not very good at it. We know this because we have professional interviewers who find it hard enough with training. ‘Everyday people’ doing their job just makes the citizenry stupid.
  • The far left liberals don’t need to put everything they display on a red background. It’s already clear they’re the communist party. They did, however, have by far the best presentation, with ‘live’ text on the screen and short snippet-like responses: the kind of thing needed to keep a viewer interested. How many people will really wait for 15 minutes to see all of the broadcasts? I’m guessing, not that many.
  • Ségolène Royal had active and lively graphics but instead of showing a lot of what she had done, most of the time, as when they had dozens of clips of her in bubbles flying toward the viewer, it made the production look amateur. She was also the only candidate who didn’t face the camera head on. She looked like she really meant to talk to somebody else on the other side of the room rather than the camera.
  • There was no mention of the Iraq war in any of the broadcasts. The top topics were unemployment (‘le chômage est beaucoup trop haut’), tax on business , immigration (‘nous avons toujours la peur dans notre pays’) and nationalism (‘being a citizen should be an honour not a right!’), the environment, economic protectionism (I’ll tell Bruxelles to…’) and a need for a renewal of social values. Many of the broadcasts seemed to say absolutely nothing at all, or at least ten seconds after their end I’d already forgotten the content.
  • Neither Bayrou, Le Pen nor Sarkozy were on tonight. Perhaps that’s a special treat for tomorrow.

In the news, the thing that really struck me (call me strange), is that the ads on political billboards put up in every town (normally outside schools and other public buildings) are put up by ClearChannel. ClearChannel, an American multinational that controls billboards all over the world, hundreds of radio stations in the US and a large number of concert venues and promotion vehicles. I just think it’s ironic that a company that stands for so much that France is actively against is the one actually promoting their political process.

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