My Beck Pages

Google News has made it easier to customize its home page with the creation of a Custom Sections Directory that includes material created both by Google and by Google News users.

User interface design is one of the most important aspects of web application design, and alot of the time is revisted only when the app is finished, rather than setting out on the right path at the get go.

That's not to say that news pieces as we know them are journalistic dinosaurs. After all, people go to Wikipedia for summaries of newsworthy topics after finding out about them through more traditional channels. I doubt that many use the site as their primary news source. At a population level, a mix of approaches seems best - reporting of news alongside living resources that place them within a broader landscape.

Science journalist Ed Yong nicely synthesizes recent threads by Jason Fry and Matt Thompson on updating the methods we use to present news.

Why didn’t we change? Journalists are masters at filtering, synthesizing and presenting information, yet we’ve spent more than a decade repurposing a 19th-century form of specialized storytelling instead of starting fresh with the possibilities of a new medium. Newspapers could have been Wikipedia, instead of being left to try and learn from it. And what are we learning? The news article is in some fundamental ways just as broken as the game story — if it weren’t, Jimmy Wales wouldn’t see a surge of traffic to Wikipedia in the wake of any big news event. We need to rethink the basics: If we were starting today, would we do this? But when will we unshackle ourselves from print and really ask the question? And at what point will the answer come too late to matter?

Smart take on reinventing (read dumping) sports game stories and traditional news articles by Jason Fry.