RSSFrom the ME: Betanews releases Alpha
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published January 13, 2009, 10:03 AM
"This is an old team," began Edward R. Murrow in his very first See It Now broadcast for CBS Television, "trying to learn a new trade."
Now, over the past few years, I've been guilty of telling folks that Betanews is not a blog, in the same spirit as telling your neighbor trying to borrow your sports car to haul furniture that it's not a truck. A few reasons for that: I don't want Betanews to become one of these peanut-galleries for the practice of would-be journalism -- of essentially replicating stories seen or printed elsewhere and calling it "coverage." We won't be doing that here, and thus ends my list of the things that Betanews Alpha is not.
What Alpha is, is a place where stories and ideas begin. I've argued for over two decades that online journalism can have an advantage over print and television, in that it can present the facts as they emerge, in a literary manner. Our purpose here will be to start discourses and sessions about the important aspects of information technology. I want to avoid saying we're here to "start a dialog" with you, in an effort not to sound like Hillary Clinton or Rush Limbaugh, or anyone else who has ever camouflaged a one-way diatribe in the garb of a two-way dialog.
That said, once we isolate the parts of the journalistic process with greater granularity, we realize that stories, such as they are, are not complete capsules of information. News evolves, alters, metamorphoses into a form and direction we often don't expect. Whereas a newspaper is often charged with the duty of revealing "the whole story," at our level -- where everything is live and unfolding simultaneously -- there rarely is any such thing. The complete picture only emerges once you, the reader, are given the tools and resources to piece together the various interlocking facets.
So that's our purpose here: to paraphrase Sen. Howard Baker, to more frequently tell you what we know when we know it. And when the world changes and we know something else, or we learn that what we thought we knew is actually something different, we'll tell you that too.
So wait, now I need to see duplicates of the news stories on the homepage plus a triplicate of some of them at the top of the page? I am sorry, but my 7 year old can design better layouts than this. Get rid of the "Featured stories" section, bring back the original fileforum layout or change the current one to mimic that one, and make the site easier to navigate. This is a step backwards if you ask me. I don't want to see the same story plastered over the page 3 different ways when I visit the homepage. I used to be able to see new file releases and a few new news articles upon my initial visit, no scrolling required, to the homepage. Now it is just awful.
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|OK, not to be-labour the point but... as of 11:00am GMT on 15th Jan, the first 8 "Featured Articles" visible on the right side of the first page are also visible as news elements on the same page, in some cases side by side? 2 Featured Articles also appear as Page Headlines, 2 appear on the Alpha Page index and 4 on the _adjacent_ left hand news column. Why is this better than a brief summary of the latest file releases?
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|Lol. Omg... What in the world did I just started?
But, seriously... The Betanews team should take the new Microsoft approach: listen to users! Hire someone to re-organize the site if you have to. Keep it simple and make it user-friendly.
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|The new design for betanews is just terrible. You have effectively lost ALL the flow the website previously had. Instead of a professional site that people would go to for news, you now have a website that assaults the senses the same way a spyware/malware page does. For the sake of all betanews-ians, I hope that you will alter the site back to the more user-friendly interface.
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|I agree 100%
By the way, the "new" Betanews is bad, very bad .... but the "new" Fileforum is EVEN WORSE
And, since no one has posted it before, and the phrase just begs to be written: "If it ain't broke ..." (you know the rest, don't you?)
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|Grrr! I hate this new format. There's too much going on. It was easier for my eye to glimpse at articles in the old format. This new format causes me to have to concentrate more on where things are, as opposed to being able to quickly do what I come here for.
The old format worked so well. I miss the file forum integration as well. Made more sense that way!
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|this new betanews sucks!!!!!
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|This new look is a total disaster imho. If you can't make something better than it was, then leave it alone. Change just for the sake of change is crazy.
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|Hi treworld -- thanks for asking. The front page is the front page, where the news stories live; it'll modify a bit from its CES look, but the design is indeed graduating from the old school. Alpha (as I suspect we'll all end up calling it for short) is our first blog and will have shorter items and (sometimes) a more off-the-cuff approach.
if I had to predict, I suspect Alpha's likely to catch both breaking news and the odd item that's worth telling you about but can't be reasonably worked into a full-on news article. (We find a remarkable amount of those items every day, as I'm sure you'd guess.) In fact, I was just dropping in to write one of those posts now...
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|I'm so confused.... So "Alpha" is what Betanews's homepage was (before the CES event info)? I think there should be a special section (page) dedicated to CES and other events rather than stuff it all in the homepage. The current homepage is too busy right now.
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|Too busy and missing what was, to me, an important element of Betanews. The side by side format of News and Files. I guess I will be mistaken for one of those who objects to change of any sort but there seemed to be some value in the original format of having recent file releases side by side with news items that often overlapped. I know, I know its a simple click to go from the the front page to the file forum but as I say, I come to Betanews for the uniqueness of having both interests on one page. Lists of files and pages of news are available at many sites, Betanews had an interesting synergy that I will miss. Perhaps the new Alpha page might include the file list instead?
Anyway I would underscore the first point again. Front page is way to busy at the moment.
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|I totally agree with AndyAmo. The front page is far to busy, and I miss the side by side info of news and files.
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|While I believe a change was warranted and the new graphics are indeed an improvement, I, too, will miss having FileForum integrated into the BetaNews portal. I dont understand how the site width has increased by about 20% but you've managed to disclude what was once one of the most important parts of my BetaNews experience.
The alpha design works. Except, the featured stories should be a few large icons at the top (much like the non-alpha page) and the right column should be the expanded FileForum view that the visitors are used to.
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|Go back 2 years and ta da, CES had a seperate page, ces.betanews.com
http://74.125.47.132/sea...us&client=firefox-a
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