Take a look at this site. There’s a lot of great content. But where do I start if I don’t have all the time in the world and want to meaningfully engage with the news? Do I start with the topics at the top and work my way down? Do I start with one of the videos? Do I follow the size of the text from largest to smallest? There are just so many words on this page with no sense of order, it’s not clear what the news actually is.

This kind of layout is what we’d expect from a newspaper. But something created for a young and sophisticated audience needs better design, better visual hierarchy and more color. We grew up in the age of iPod ads, and for us, design matters.

And please, please, please, make it easy to search. Wikipedia is part of the fabric of our lives. We’re used to falling down holes into hours of learning about related topics. If you want to be able to compete with Wikipedia, you have to make acquiring knowledge just as easy. Give 👏 me 👏 context 👏.

Where’s the middle?

This tweet contains 12 words. The story it links to contains over 4,600.

Where’s the middle?

My understanding is that in the age of newspapers, news and features (or “enterprise” stories) were produced separately, leaving little space for the production of something in-between. This tweet and story are recent extreme examples, but they show how this divide persists in the internet age.

But it’s 2017 now. Who said we couldn’t have multiple versions of the same story? From as short as a 12-word tweet, to a 200-word brief, to an 800-word explainer, to a 2,000-word feature? Let the user consume your content on their terms.

And by the way, because one of the quotes above brought it up: produce a social video only if the format makes sense. Some stories work better in text than on video, and if you are producing content that’s not presented in the best way possible, users will notice: “This isn’t high-quality. Therefore this news organization isn’t high-quality.” None of us want that.

What’s missing?