User:Joca/essay draft

"The homepage is not dead." In a time where many news media are focused on how their content is displayed in Google News, or try to game Facebooks newsfeed algorithm, defending your own homepage is quite a statement. S. Mitra Kalita, the vice president for programming at CNN Digital, did so in front of an audience of social media marketeers.

Although articles are distributed on other platforms, and people might not need to visit the homepage of a news medium, it pays off to focus on the homepage: it's an interface where you have full control, and one which is used by the most loyal readers. Kalita worked on a strategy where different channels focus on specific contexts of reading and watching the news of CNN (Beard, 2018).

The mobile homepage is designed for the daily routine of readers, from the urgent news in the moning, to deep reads for the commute home. Newsletters are a way to keep people up to date about specific niches. Kalita's aim with this strategy is to preserve and dominate a core audience on their own website and app, but to give hooks to connect to new users who might find CNN news via other platforms.

Better way to make connection between these paragraphs here

Even when focusing on getting your news across on other platforms than your own homepage, there is an interface around that content. - Missing something here - That makes it valuable to know how the interface plays a role in the process of understanding and engaging with news.

In the discussion about how to do meaningful journalism in this age, the influence of the interface is often overlooked. Experiments focus on new ways of doing research, different methods to involve the audience and new ways of storytelling by using rich media: from VR to blablabla.

For people who create the content, the scope of the interface is limited to the one article, video or VR environment they are working on. The posterchild of that approach is Snow Fall. This longread about the avalanche in Tunnel Creek was published by the New York Times in 2012. It featured a ground breaking design with full screen videos, slideshows and special effects when reader scrolled through the article.

Many other publications copied the format and snowfalling was declared to be 'the future of journalism'. It didn't work out that way, mostly because of the time and resources it takes to create these rich articles with custom interfaces: Snow Fall alone took 6 months to make and had 11 people working on the graphics and the design. In the meantime the interface of the normal articles stayed the same, because the article was made fully outside the systems that the Times used for their 'normal' articles.

What the examples of CNN and the New York Times show is the influence of the interface on how people engage with an article. -Some statement how people got excited about the interface- That makes it important to not leave the design of it to the people responsible for distributing and marketing.

// this should be phrased better

Job to be done Before imagining what the interface could mean for engaging journalism, it is good to identify the mainstream principles of what is considered to be a good interface. The foundations of that come come from the field of Human-Computer Interaction. Traditionally, they approach interface and user experience (UX) design from a task based perspective.

Emotions and experiences are keywords in the third wave.They are a result of the negation and discussion of rationality and purposefulness in the second wave, the focus on non-work, and motivation.

± Baek

Even though there is more space for involving the experience next to solving problems, it is questionable what type of experience is pursued for the job to be done.

Best practices are shared. Libraries with interaction patterns.

universally used practices in navigating through interfaces, and ways they are set up to lead users to conversion: be it buying goods, or spending time. However, are the foundations for a successful e-commerce interface necessarily the same for the interface of a news medium?

Humanistic Interface The activity of interpreting information has a secondary role within those principles.

Digital interfaces → part of interaction. Look into different startingpoints.

An different perspective of interface theory is the humanistic interface (Drucker, 2014). This theory fills the interpretation gap in the current practice of UX design, because it approaches the interaction design from the idea of critical insight: focusing on comparison, contrast and offering space to make meaning instead of simply presenting content efficiently.

Performative materiality // This model emphasizes the interpretative event of the production of work. It sees materiality as a set of characteristics that work as cues and triggers that provoke an individual experience.

→ Examples by Drucker → Examples in journalism

Elements of the humanistic interface are visible in different news media, where they have an positive influence on how people engage with and trust in news. It is important to link these attempts to a theory of interface, because it enables discussion on this topic and more importantly, it helps to adopt these practices to design interfaces that help news media in creating trust and engagement.