Chris Roper.
Welcome to the new Mail & Guardian website. It’s a work in progress, and we’re hoping you’ll send us any comments or suggestions that will help us to finesse the finished product.
Why have we redesigned our site? Simply put, because it didn’t fit our editorial aspirations and the needs of our readers.
Journalism has changed dramatically since the design of our last website, four years ago. The modern news organisation has to cater for the powerful new tools available to journalists, and indeed to readers. For example, social media has become integral to the dissemination and creation of news, and our new site will make it much easier to share content, and to collaborate on bringing news stories to light.
Open newsrooms and data journalism are vital components of doing effective, compelling journalism, and our new site will make it possible for us to grow those areas of our coverage. It’ll also help us to provide South Africans with the tools to understand their world better, and to be able to contribute to the shaping of that world.
Multimedia in South Africa was in its infancy four years ago, due to both technological constraints and editorial indifference. This has changed: in the last year, our readers watched over a million pieces of original multimedia on our site, and bandwidth constraints are increasingly being eased in South Africa. The new site design makes it possible for us to showcase our video much more effectively, and to design story packages that can contain video, infographics and text in a much more cohesive, attractive, and (this bit is the most important), usable way.
The Mail & Guardian has always been about providing analytical, intelligent and in-depth coverage of the news, rather than simply reproducing the generic breaking news of many other sites. Our new site is designed to allow you to easily differentiate between original Mail & Guardian content, and necessary breaking news.
We’ve also made it easier to find those special Mail & Guardian investigative, political and thought-provoking pieces that can retain readers’ interest over a longer period than the usual short time frame of online news publishing. We need to make sure that you have a front page that changes with the 24/7 demands of breaking news, but at the same time allow you to easily find the big, heavyweight pieces that are primarily why you come to the Mail & Guardian.
At the same time, we have tried to resist the impulse to be flashy. We were very determined to avoid the mistake of asking our readers to embrace an entirely new way of finding their way around the Mail & Guardian. If we’ve succeeded, you should actually feel that there is less on the page than usual. The front page is designed, paradoxically perhaps, to be less cluttered but with more opportunities to click, and to feel familiar but at the same time fresh.
We’ve veered slightly from this with our authoritative Arts & Culture section, as we believe that this content is consumed in a different way. You come to the Mail & Guardian news page to be informed about exactly what’s important, but you surf the Arts section to be seduced by an array of content. So we’ve allowed ourselves the luxury of a content carousel on Arts, and of slightly more visually rich design on sections like Multimedia and Special Reports.
I could go on, but it’s time to hand over to you. Please send us any suggestions to improve the site, either via email or on Twitter using #newmg.
Chris Roper is the Mail & Guardian Online editor. Follow Chris on Twitter: @chrisroper
Follow the Mail & Guardian on Twitter: @mailandguardian