MSNBC Skips Social News Trend

Standing out for your online news offering is rapidly becoming almost impossible for publishers.

After all, as we each get smarter about using RSS feeds to only get the content we want, the old "news portal" sites of several years ago are becoming less and less important. Add to that the rise of "social news" and the idea that user ratings on stories are a new replacement for the front page editor, and you have a media environment where online news providers are very right to be worried. Combating this, many are taking new approaches to presenting news in a blog-like format, such as what

Lets people think in colours - Colors are how people think, and this is a simple truth but one MSNBC uses extremely well with features that let you categorize your news on the screensaver by colors. In addition, there is an affinity for using colours to group categories of information because there is a heritage of others doing that for many years (Trivial Pursuit, Libraries, Filing Systems, etc.)

Uses the multitasking trend - As people move faster and consume media simultaneously, letting them get their news while something else is happening is vital. To date, that has meant making news content easy to port from one place to another so we can control where we read it. With the Newsbreaker game and screensaver, MSNBC takes the news content out of it's usual cycle and puts it into a format where we can consume it while doing something else - like eating lunch, or walking by a desk, or playing a game.

Fosters the forgotten art of discovery - When it comes to news, many people are forgetting the pleasures of discovery. That moment when you come upon a story that you might never have seen, tear it out of the paper (or bookmark it online) to save for later is rapidly disappearing. With RSS feeds, the casuality of convenience is discovery. We filter out the unexpected and miss the chance to see it. MSNBC brings that discovery back with Newstream and Newsbreaker, and make users realize how important it really is.