The good, the bad and the cops

This article has some strong design points for online use but also a couple weaknesses. The initial reason it caught my eye was a discrepancy between the headline and the content of the story.

When I first came across the story, it had a headline the led me to believe the story would be about the police presence outside the G-20 summit in London. The linked story, however, carried a different headline (“G-20 Protests Lose Some Momentum”) and was primarily about the protesters. The headline has since been changed on the front page to reflect the story’s real headline, but I found it interesting that there was such a misleading headline in the first place.

The photograph chosen for the story seems to match the headline first listed on the front page. I think it’s a cool photo and is related to the story, but I would have preferred to see a picture of the protesters. Police involvement is a detailed in the story but the main focus is still the protesters.

One area this article is strong in is linking to related content. There is a small “Related” box with another story about the protesters, but the article also links keywords within the body of the story. For example, when it mentions a French climber who hung a banner from a building he climbed, it links to a story about the same man climbing the New York Times building in New York City, complete with a video and audio interview. In addition to specific stories, subject areas like global warming and the G-20 summit itself link to pages aggregating all related stories from the Times.

Other than the headline, there were a few other things I didn’t like on the page. The right side of the page featured a link to an online column titled “Good idea, poor execution.” At first glance, I thought the column was responding to the article. After clicking the link and reading a few graphs, however, I found out it was about a busy designer who had started using GIPE in every-day conversation. It wasn’t clear from the news story that the link wasn’t connected to the story.

Additionally, I feel the story is a bit long for online. The Times can get away with this for obvious reasons but I think it’s something to be generally avoided.

As an unrelated side note, here's an AP story that slipped by with a typo. Tsk tsk!