Omaha World Herald Redesign
It’s been awhile since I’ve visited the North but Thanksgiving brought me up to Omaha, Nebraska and every morning I got to see the new(ish) Omaha World-Herald. Generally pleased by what I saw, I thought I’d continue my newspaper re-design reviews “column” and give a quick review.
The Omaha World-Herald has been around since 1885, just about one hundred and twenty years longer than my company. If that doesn’t give you perspective on it’s role in the community, the World-Herald is locally owned and is the largest employee-owned daily newspaper in the United States. It also has the 4th best market home Sunday circulation penetration rate in the country (via owh) and ranks #52 nationally in circulation (via infoplease) - 2 spots ahead of the Statesman, I might add. Pretty good for a city of only ~390,007 people.
Likes
- Uniform Sub-section Headers - Probably THE most noticeable feature of the newspaper and most definitely THE biggest UX improvement.
- The Sports Section is “branded” to match the University of Nebraska. This is a really good bit of contextualization because as any sports fan knows the whole state of Nebraska is a fan of the Huskers, and if you’re not, you probably don’t belong in the state.
- Like above, the Money Section is green. Green = money. No brainer.
- The header of the page gives valuable ad/feature space that doesn’t take away focus from the headlines.
- Good balance of GOOD photography and print.
Dislikes
I have to confess that I didn’t spend enough time with the paper to bring up a list of dislikes. But I have always found the OWH to be pretty fair and genuinely written, not glazed with a sleazy bias. But that’s less about design and more about political ethics.
I will say though, on researching information for this article I went to the Omaha World Herald website and was appalled by it. I tried to come up with reasons for it. Maybe it’s a surrender to the big machines like CNN.com and MSNBC.com who have the online news market cornered. Maybe it’s too costly to modernize. Maybe a web redesign is in the works - if there isn’t one yet, please call me. Paravel would love to help. But despite my pining for an answer, I was left looking at a site that doesn’t reflect the vibrance of the paper version.
I think it’s a shame that “smaller” newspapers don’t have awesome websites. I guess there’s a budget issue to consider, but to me smaller newspapers should have a rapidly advancing web presence due to the fact that the volume of information is way less than say the Los Angeles Times.
And a continually updating web presence is important in this day and age. As kids turn to the internet for answers on a daily basis, in 20 years, your paper subscriptions will be obsolete. So you should get people hooked on your RSS feeds now (the Herald’s RSS feed isn’t true RSS, btw).[/rant]
In Conclusion
Good paper. Nice headers. Terrible website. That compress my feelings quite nicely.
↑↑ Please forgive my iPhone photography, it was all I had on hand.
