We all hailed The Boston Globe when it launched its responsive site last year, and Engadet — one of the oldest and largest technology blogs – recently launched a similar redesign. Here are a few points where newspapers and other media can draw inspiration as they move increasingly to responsively designed websites.

1. Display section header as you scroll

This is something I haven’t seen in this style before. For the more extensive, long form articles on Engadget that are broken up by section headers, the title of the header remains at the top of the window as you scroll through. This visual indicator helps those of us with short attention spans to keep track of where we are in a story and remember the the theme for that section. It also helps us feel like we’re being productive — recognition that we’re making progress as we read.

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Right now we’re focused on responsive design. Perhaps after that comes responsive content.

If you’re a reader of Nieman Reports, you’ll remember the cover story from early this fall, “Breaking News: Mastering the Art of Disruptive Innovation in Journalism.” Nieman Fellow David Skok along with James Allworth co-wrote the piece with Clay Christensen, one of Harvard’s brilliant and popular business faculty.

One of Christensen’s main areas of academic focus is the concept of disruptive innovation and competition in business; this widely-shared article applied Christensen’s analysis – which has helped revitalize numerous businesses before his years academia – to the news industry, where an understood problem is figuring out how to survive and how to thrive.

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Journalists should go to more conferences that aren’t tailored to journalists. While we’re focusing on getting developer resources in the newsroom and trying to get the support infrastructure to do data and design experiments, there are web designers out there in the world who don’t have to ask these questions and are instead focusing on the right tools to actually get things done. At least that was the takeaway for me this weekend at my first non-journalism-specific conference in ages: the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit. Hundreds of developers and designers joined for the weekend to talk about the open source platform Drupal and tools to maximize Drupal’s usage. Here’s a list of the top tools I discovered around CSS3, responsive design and rapid prototyping.  Read more