SmartPlaneteers,
In celebration of our three-year anniversary — can you believe it? — we gave our newsletters a facelift on Friday.
Both the daily and weekly sends got an all-new look. You can see the difference above (click the image to make it bigger) or live, here and here.
A few points to consider:
- When we redesigned this website in January 2011, we didn’t touch the newsletters. Hopefully this brings them more in line, visually.
- The content (and volume of it) hasn’t changed.
- But it might later. We’re trying to produce fewer, better stories on the site; we’d like the newsletters to match.
- You also got to meet Aly Windsor for the first time, who has been dutifully and diligently producing the newsletters since April 4 of this year. We hope you’ll appreciate that the stories these newsletters contain are selected by (her) hand, not by an algorithm.
It’s point number three for which I’m most interested in hearing your feedback. You see, we’re doing some really great stuff on SmartPlanet — columnists, foreign dispatches, feature stories, Q&As — the kind of stuff free websites like ours don’t normally offer.
But sometimes those stories get drowned out by the volume of daily blog posts around them. (And don’t get me wrong; I find the daily shorts highly interesting. But you see my point.)
What we’d like to do — and it will take some time! — is further demarcate the “good” stuff from the “daily” stuff, so you can devour the daily briefs throughout the week and know where to look when time allows you to chew on the more cerebral stuff.
Today, it’s all mixed together, both in the newsletters and on the front page. In my opinion, it can get terribly noisy, with up to 20 stories per newsletter.
It’s just one idea, but we’d like to hear from you about it. What say you?
