The Producer

We have a number of new blogs at NPR that show promise:

The Two-Way (news)
All Tech Considered (personal technology)
A Blog Supreme (jazz)

Take a look and let us know what you think!

Could we use a new source of news? I’m thinking we could.

I’m calling it “Maximum Planet,” a riff on the title of Suketu Mehta’s book “Maximum City.”

It’s my belief that the future is being written right now in places like Brazil, Nigeria, India, Malaysia and China. But we’re still looking at these places as outliers, suppliers and backwaters. We don’t see them for what they are.

They are the new leaders. They see the world from a different perspective. And they’re combining the tools of the information age and global commerce with a massive advantage in human capital to chart their own course into the future.

This isn’t a new idea. It has been widely observed that the last century was the “American Century” and that this century will be the “Pacific Century.” But this shift — assuming it is actually happening — has not been fully reflected in the media. And, anyway, I’d argue that this will be much more than the “Pacific” century. There are interesting ideas and developments on every continent.

(I do want to note that NPR — where I work — is an exception to this observation. The company has long displayed a commitment to chronicling the lives of people around the world. It is one of many stand-out features of America’s premier broadcast news organization.)

I think it’s finally time for a news organization with a holistic view of the world and an innovative approach to content creation and distribution.

I’m imagining something like The Economist for the new media age, with the addition of cultural coverage akin to that found in the NYT and the human tone of NPR.

Some people are moving in this direction, from biggies such as the NYT and NPR to upstarts such as GlobalPost and GroundReport. But they aren’t quite at the place I’m imagining, yet.

For a little while now NPR has had a small visual-journalism team in place. Now they have a podcast. You should subscribe. It’s worth watching. They’re leading the effort to translate NPR’s strength as audio storytellers into a world they call Radio Pictures. You can also find their work at NPR.org/multimedia.

John Poole, Coburn Dukehart, David Gilkey and Keith Jenkins are NPR’s multimedia department. They are producing the stories that take NPR into the realm of sight. Check it out. I think you’ll like it.

(In case it’s not obvious, I work for NPR. But, I think, that has very little to do with my admiration for the multimedia team. )

Why is the Web organized into pages? Why? The Web is just a way of making information more widely available. It’s not intended to create a newspaper with 70,000 pages. That’s of no use to anyone. Lots of work has been done on the computer UIs. Why isn’t that work being applied to news Web sites? The Web is just a widely distributed computer — like John Gage apparently said. Why do we access it through a clunky interface intended to remind us of a paper? The Web is an almost infinite well of information that should be accessed in the most efficient manner possible. I can guarantee you that that manner is not in the style of a scrolling page on a computer monitor.

Something that has nagged at me since I started in the Web news business in 1996 has been the inability of anyone to design a site that is a satisfying experience for the user.

I’ve observed and participated in any number of design exercises and I’ve always been left wanting more when the process was over and the element, page or site was published.

After giving it some thought (yes, years of thought), I have come to the conclusion that the problem with many news and information sites — possibly all of them — is that they are based the the false premise that the information on the Web should be organized into “pages.”

The Web is not a newspaper or book. It is a tool for communicating all manner of information, much of which is not suited for the page metaphor.

It seems like the only people who understand that information on the Web needs to be organized and presented in new ways are advertising and marketing firms.

Why can’t news and information companies come to the realization that the Internet is best resolved in some form other than a narrow, scrolling page? Why can’t we realize that even our best attempts at presentation on the Web typically end up looking more like abstract modern art than rational attempts to inform and entertain users?

It’s high time we redefine the user experience for people seeking news and information on the Internet.