Five things The Independent needs to do to survive online

Now The Independent has shut down its print operations, TH_NK’s Tom Moran looks at what changes it will need to make as it heads into the digital wilderness.

“The newspaper industry is changing, and that change is being driven by readers. They’re showing us that the future is digital.” – Evgeny Lebedev, owner of The Independent

Over the weekend, The Independent became the UK’s first national newspaper to move from print to being purely digital, ending its 30-year print run.

Unlike the traditional tried and tested world of print media, digital is a constantly changing ecosystem where reading and advertising trends can change or become entirely extinct overnight. To make the transition to online successful, The Independent needs to lay a strong digital foundation so they can adapt to the shifting sands of online behavior and commerce.

1. Don’t forget the design basics

Basic, foundational design principles can often be overlooked in a rush to use the latest design tricks. Immediately worrying about screen sizes, responsive design templates or apps can mistakenly put an emphasis on the device before the reader.

For an article based website, getting the simple fundamentals is paramount. When dealing with long copy, serifed fonts such as Georgia are read faster onscreen and should rarely be smaller than 16 pixels. Line length should be kept around 70 characters to reduce eye strain, while paragraphs need to be short and broken up with bullet points, highlights and lists.

The Independent homepage is a scattered patchwork of articles, which is a common layout for news websites. Though this helps put more articles on the screen at once, it can be disorientating and confusing to understand. Structured content, lists and filters can all help reduce visual noise and help readers find the information that is of interest to them.

It’s fundamental that The Independent puts the individual customer first to deliver content that is uniquely curated dependent on their tastes, views or routines. A huge matrix of variables need to be considered to deliver news that is relevant and interesting to the individual reader from global to local news.

Instead of mimicking, The Independent needs to pioneer and stand out from the crowd with a website that is bold, original and designed with the reader in mind.

2. Bring stories to life

The ace card of a digital-only news service is the ability to enhance an article with rich media content. Animation, photography, video and infographics are all ways to bring stories to life in a way that is only possible online.

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The award winning New York Times’ ‘Snow Fall‘ feature is an excellent example of blending long copy with rich media. In a digital-only world words are simply not enough; readers are looking for articles that come to life before them.

To prove that digital is the future, The Independent needs to demonstrate and pioneer a service that traditional print and aggregate news sites cannot compete with.

3. Advertise without adverts

Year on year banner adverts are earning less and less revenue. Intrusive adverts only serve to distract, annoy or confuse loyal readers and mobile screens often mean many won’t even see them.

Too many ads? Currently The Independent’s website is saturated by different ad formats.

Paywalls can work, but for many customers getting access to articles simply isn’t enough. More and more news services are moving from subscriptions to memberships that include access to exclusive offers, discounts, gig tickets or live events.

Recently there have been a few examples where insightful journalism and rich media have been combined with advertising to create something truly powerful. The New York Times’ article in partnership with Netflix Women Inmates: Why the Male Model Doesn’t Work is a great example of advertising and journalism working in harmony.

The Independent has to understand not only what its customers want to read, but how they want to pay for it. If it’s a membership fee then there must be benefits; if paying by article then it must be flexible; and to truly innovate they need to work with advertisers to create original engaging content.

4. Rise of the robo-journalist

With the connective power of social media, news is able to spread faster than ever before. Often, people are alerted to breaking news via mentions on social media and then go to news sites for confirmation and analysis. For online news services, the race to get news live is more important than ever.

The Los Angeles Times was able to post an article on its website about an earthquake within three minutes of it happening, due to a computer program called Quakebot instantly inserting live data from the U.S. Geological Survey into a pre-written template.

The benefit of digital is the ability to continually evolve a story. By investing in Robo-journalism The Independent would be able to post news immediately and then allow the article to become enhanced by their excellent human journalists as the story evolves.

5. Revolutionise reading

The way readers consume information online is changing. From desktop screens to wearables; news sites need to be on the cutting edge of shifting customer behaviours.

More and more digital brands are starting to experiment with Chat-as-Interface. Simple messaging interfaces that look like iChat or WhatsApp but powered by smart AI ‘bots’. Chat-as-Interface will be the most revolutionary thing to happen to the internet since mobile.

By turning services into simple chat messages the user is empowered to pull information to them by ‘talking’ to a digital service like a human. Chat as interface is already starting to make big waves in the travel and e-commerce industries and will have a huge effect on news.

The Quartz news app is already pioneering this trend, allowing customers to ‘chat’ with a news service, able to ask for news or dismiss stories they aren’t interested in.

Moving forward The Independent needs to be able to quickly adapt and develop to these new customer trends by leading the pack. Chat is the perfect place to start a revolution in reading.

Due to the enormous amount of content online there has been a subtle, but fundamental shift in customer behaviour that The Independent needs to be fully aware of.

News sites can no longer wait for readers to come to them, but instead they must go to the reader. The customer is now in control of what content they read, how they read it and where they read.

The editors need to move aside; the reader is now in charge.

Tom Moran is a senior UX designer at TH_NK