I have long been fascinated by The Voice of San Diego, a membership-based investigative news site in Southern California. Their model is one from which many news organizations can learn — they were doing memberships long before paywalls were cool, they understand the importance of covering specific niches in a community, they have a strong focus on watchdog investigations, and they’ve always made reader engagement core to their journalism. Today, the organization has relaunched its website with new software that uses technology to help amplify those goals. They realized that their old CMS was holding them back, and relaunched a spiffy new design in a move from which the rest of us in the new industry could surely learn (but I’m biased).

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The Oregonian’s online presence at OregonLive.com got a partial facelift this morning with a redesign of its homepage and complete restructuring of its navigation menu — its first design revisions since 2008.

According to an announcement blog post, the biggest complaint of the old homepage was that the site was “too cluttered.” The redesign reduces some of that clutter by eliminating dozens of static links and replacing them with headlines.

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I’m not even going to pretend to be objective in this post — I am absolutely in love with the new BostonGlobe.com. The site, which launched today, is a whole new online brand for The Boston Globe, whose content formerly only existed on the all-encompassing Boston.com.

But it’s not just the design that I’m in love with. I’m in love with the idea of starting fresh — no rules, no old elements to retain — just a brand new site with a clean slate. And The Globe didn’t hold back; they’ve rethought how news should be presented in a way that no other major news organization has had the opportunity to do.

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When I first saw a demo of the collaborative video editing tool Stroome at the 2009 Online News Association Conference in San Francisco, its user interface was still a little clunky and unintuitive. It’s been almost two years since then and Stroome is all grown up now — this week they launched a slick new redesign and introduced a new collaboration feature called “groups.” Read more

Sometime amidst the coverage of earthquake and tsunami in Japan, The Washington Post rolled out a fresh new design for its homepage, navigation and most of its subsections over the weekend.

The new design is much more modern and clean than the old homepage that looked like something out of the late ’90s. According to a press release from The Post, the new design is “intended to further reader engagement and discussion around Post journalism and showcase more multimedia content.”

Justin Ferrell and Sarah Sampsel of The Washington Post design team published a post at the new Innovations Blog about the goals behind some of the changes, and they summed up the problem with the old design accurately: “It was great for the thing you came for, but if you wanted to look around, it was kind of a mess.”  The new Innovations blog is a cool thing in and of itself, perhaps worthy of its own post. Says managing editor Raju Narisetti in a letter about the redesign, the Innovations Blog is “where we hope to share with you our latest endeavors, whether it is involving readers in storytelling or sharing how we are trying to marry Post journalism with new digital tools, such as graphics you can play with or databases that let you dig deeper.” But, back to design.

The most noticeable change for the new design is the organized grouping of elements within article pages. If you look at the screengrab above, the article text flows better throughout the page because it’s not being disrupted by different sized widgets splashed throughout the content.

Perhaps one of the most interesting new pieces of functionality on the site is an “enhanced” commenting system that will essentially allow editors at WaPo curate the best comments and commenters on the site. The best comments will be prominently featured, and although comments will be open to everyone, select commenters (based on prior activity and quality of contributions to the site) will be identified to participate in open forums. This marks one of the most forward-thinking aspects of the redesign, because it takes into account not only aesthetics of the site, but places value on its community and incentives the contribution of high-quality content from readers. (It’s a second big step for The Post recently in seeking user feedback, after last month having launched  a community correction form). Read more