By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor
Earlier this year, USA Today unveiled a new look to its Web site incorporating the national newspaper’s goal of sparking community-level dialogues between readers across the country.
To that end, the redesigned site features a variety of social tools to give readers an opportunity to interact with reporters and other network participants.
It’s all part of USA Today’s network journalism initiative, said Joel Sucherman, executive producer of USA Today.
“It’s in the USA Today pedigree to reach out and to talk to the community and have a sense of respect for them and their views,” he said. “Since day one of the newspaper we’ve been more of a community around the United States.”
The Gannett Co. Inc.-owned paper’s Web site is using Pluck Corp.’s SiteLife and BlogBurst syndication software to offer visitors blogs, photos, reader comments and other social networking options.
“We worked with Pluck to incorporate these social networking tools that we deployed — comments, recommendations and reader profile pages — and used their API (application programming interface) to style and blend the functionality of the software exactly to what we were looking for,” Sucherman said.
Wider format
The redesign, launched in early March, takes advantage of the wider 1,024-by-768-pixel resolution used on many computer monitors.
The main homepage has dozens of links with headers color-coded to reflect USA Today’s four major sections. To make navigation easier for users, the page is divided into two sections. The left side highlights top news stories; photos, videos and blogs. An “Only on USA Today” section features additional enterprise stories, photo galleries and other content, including the paper’s ongoing 25th anniversary coverage.
The upper left portion boasts a photo “carousel,” featuring the day’s main photos. When users move their mouse over the thumbnail photos, the images change depending upon what’s selected.
“The lead thumbnail is usually what USA Today feels is the top news story of the moment,” Sucherman said. “But then the second through fourth thumbnails will be a little softer (news), a big sports story or something from the Life or Money section we want to feature prominently.”
The other half of the page presents tabs that feature the day’s top headlines as well as a news notes that contain postings from USA Today reporters.
Additionally, usatoday.com introduced interactive elements to the top banner, including quotes from readers commenting on a particular story.
“We feel it’s very important to the page; it’s one of the first things you see and it’s an early tip-off that adds to reader involvement,” Sucherman said. “It shows what readers have to say is valued and does matter.”
Reader participation extends throughout the site, with readers encouraged to comment and register their opinions on the popularity of posted articles.
For their part, USA Today’s reporters are also capitalizing on reader access, Sucherman said.
“Six months ago, many of our reporters were wary to opening the doors like this. Who knows what kind of stuff we would get from readers,” he said. “We now have a number of reporters that want to write their own blogs on profile pages about their beat or put out a call to action on specific stories.”
Changing times
USA Today began to lay the groundwork to retool the site last summer, with the primary goal of adding more interactive features.
By fall, almost 50 people were working on the redesign, Sucherman said. “They were a combination IT staff, developers, designers, editorial and business people working side by side on this project from mid-September through the launch in March.”
Although the redesigned site sports a number of features enabling reader participation, Sucherman said usatoday.com is not trying to become another MySpace. Instead, the site offers readers a variety of easy-to-access options to give them a chance to communicate with reporters and other readers.
“We know our readers are time-pressed, busy and they are not going to spend four hours a night pulling YouTube videos onto their page,” Sucherman said. “But we thought that even if a small percentage of our audience actually is active in the (online) community, then it has value to the overwhelming majority of the audience.”
The revamped site is an effort by Gannett to adapt to the dramatic way people are consuming media, Sucherman said.
“You had the 500-year old model of the printing press and one media organization speaking to the masses,” he said. Now, “New media technology gives everyone a chance to become their own publisher.”
Web site Snapshot
www.usatoday.com
Launched April 17, 2005
Last major redesign: March 2007
Owner: Gannett Co. Inc.
Employees dedicated to staff: 120
Editorial*: 75
Number of comments posted
March 2007 – 60,000
April 2007 – 100,000
Web Traffic for USA Today**
Unique Visitors: 10,349,773
Active Reach: 7.18 percent
Web Page Views: 142,012,570
Web Pages Per Visitor: 13.72
Visits Per Visitor:3.96
Time Per Visitor: 00: 15: 56 (hh:mm:ss)
NAA NAdbase report for USA Today
All-Total
Unique Visitors 10,349,773
Page Views 141,128,249
Visitors’ household income:
$25,000-$49,999
Unique Visitors 2,388,819
Page Views 34,228,024
$50,000-$99,999
Unique Visitors 4,221,880
Page Views 52,276,295
$100,000+
Unique Visitors 2,645,835
Page Views 45,795,719
*Editorial employees include Gannett’s merged newsroom imitative in 2005.
**Source: Nielsen/NetRatings NAA NAdbase Combined Home and Work November 2006
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