MediaShift and Idea Lab
MediaShift Home Page
The MediaShift home page now has your standard reverse-chronological listing of the most recent entries, but also has a large featured article front and center, plus three feature slots across the top of the page (which are reflected across the site), a secondary feature below and a featured story from Idea Lab.
MediaShift Section Landing Page
Each of the top-level categories has its own front and center slot for a feature from that category, as well as a listing of authors who have published articles in that category.
MediaShift Article Page
The entries on MediaShift put the focus on the content, where it should be. The sidebars drop down to the right so the article is the first thing you see, the main image has its own slot at the top, and the title jumps off the page.
Idea Lab Home Page
Idea Lab’s focus is more on the ideas and thoughts of the authors, so there is more visual focus on the authors themselves, but the two sites are clearly related.
Idea Lab Article Page
Each Idea Lab entry features a link to the site of the author's Knight News Challenge project page.
Mark Glaser edits and operates two blogs about the future of media and journalism in partnership with PBS and the Knight Foundation: MediaShift and Idea Lab. He came to us in the summer of 2008 wanting to update the design of MediaShift in conjunction with some other changes he was making. MediaShift tracks and discusses how new media are influencing and changing old media; Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age. Each Idea Lab contributor has won a grant in the Knight News Challenge, sponsored by the Knight Foundation.
MediaShift had been going since 2006 and the old design was making it difficult both to keep new discussions in the public view and to draw attention to older items. We worked with Mark to create a new organizational model for the site, in order to accommodate two years of older content while improving navigation and findability going forward. Using a carefully selected set of top level categories, a more ad hoc set of secondary categories, and tags, the MediaShift editors now have much greater flexibility in building connections across their site.
With that hashed out, we turned to the visual design and focused on creating a clean, organized feel. Along with a wider layout and more vibrant colors, we created specific space on the article page for an image to accompany each article and tailored the sidebar modules to specific content types. We also created several options for featuring new material or refloating older material.
As we were working on MediaShift, Mark thought it might be a good idea to spruce up Idea Lab at the same time. Idea Lab was not in need of the same kind of architectural overhaul, so we focused on bringing the design into alignment with the new MediaShift. Along the way we brought more focus to the authors with a rotating “Featured Authors” block on the home page and more attention to the Knight Foundation and the Knight News Challenge, the forces behind the site. We applied some of the same ideas for featuring and refloating that we used on MediaShift
The PBS Interactive team were invaluable in getting these sites up, and pulled of the feat of getting both blogs moved over to the newest version of Movable Type 4 while we were working on the design, so that both sites are now updated front and back.