by Garrison Walters
Somewhere back in the spring, along about March I think, I
was doing my regular cycle of web pages when I saw something ominous: the BBC was inviting me to “preview their new
look.”
I didn’t click because I knew what it would be: lots more white space and way more use of
videos.
Sure enough, a few days later that’s what I saw.
The white space thing is a well-known factor in design.
People find pages of dense text off-putting – it’s like a signal that their
brains are going to have to do some work, and the average Joe Sixpack (Joe Pint
O’ Bitter?) doesn’t like that. The reason the New York Times is known as “the Grey Lady” is because it has so
much text that the white areas appear grey from a distance.
The use of videos instead of print also appeals to the “move-their-lips-while-they-read”
crowd.
There’s another reason why videos appeal to publishers of
web pages, of course: unlike with text,
it’s very hard to ignore the commercials.
The BBC has taken the white space thing further than most,
however: there’s now amazingly little
news on their site by comparison to most any serious news organization.
The BBC is supposed to be independent, but it seems to have
been going out of its way to curry favor with the ruling Conservatives – even before
the election. Less news and more income would seem to fit the Tory mantra.
Indeed, there’s one other change that strongly suggests a
rightward turn of what was once the world’s leading source of news: there used to be a main page heading for “Europe,”
but now you have to click on “World” first. Making the continent two clicks
away instead of one? That’s a Tory way of thinking, for sure.
