Behind The Scenes: AOL in HTML

Related link: Case Study: Enabling Change at AOL

The sleeping giant woke up in September. That’s when AOL News started publishing in HTML.

Are you smiling because you now have proof of what a backward competitor AOL News is?

Hold that thought.

For years, the giant slept during the day and wandered the countryside freely at night, snatching up audience and eating the midnight snacks of those who ignored him. AOL News established a larger audience than local Web competitors in almost all U.S. communities, predominantly on the strength of its nighttime, at-home audience. AOL News is the largest news site on the Internet, with 23-25 million unique users each month, as measured by ComScore Media Metrix.

Why switch to HTML?

The decision to publish in HTML was not as easy or natural as you might think.

We knew we could create better presentations and use more off-the-shelf applications if we moved out of our proprietary publishing system. Our old pages would not scroll and did not allow us to embed content within the body of the article so that text would wrap around that content. Consequently, we would link to video, audio and polls. Instead, we wanted to embed them.

But our old publishing system has a lot of advantages. The pages are physically small and digitally light. They download fast, even on a 28.8 modem. This is a huge competitive advantage that we knew we could not give up, despite the benefits of switching to HTML. We had a 1-2 minute speed to market when publishing, and the system scaled from several million to 23 million users easily. It also handled upwards of three million simultaneous users, so we did not crash on Sept. 11, 2001, or on presidential election nights, as many news sites did.

Switching publishing paradigms would involve fighting what AOL has taught its members for nearly a decade: You don’t have to scroll to see everything on the page. What many would view as a quaint oddity, was for us a major challenge: teaching the AOL News consumer to scroll.

Before September, AOL News pages did not have scroll bars. Many longtime AOL members do not notice scroll bars on HTML pages because they never had to use them. AOL pages were small and self-contained within the viewable screen area. To read more, the behavior was to click to another page, not to scroll down a page.

That created our next big problem with changing the member experience. AOL users aren’t used to the Web behavior of new pages or new sites populating within the same window. At AOL, just about every new page pops a new window. To navigate, you open and close windows, instead of using the back button as Web users do.

Again, this probably sounds quaint or absurd to many of you, but not scrolling and not using the back button were very real problems we could not ignore or dismiss with the simple, “It’s time AOL members join the rest of the world and learn how to use the Web.”

We started with focus groups made up of a mix of longtime and new AOL members to get a sense of how to design the pages so that it would be obvious that users should scroll. Though dangerous to base conclusions on focus group results, we wanted to see if there might be things we could learn from the comments that would help us improve the new navigation. The focus group results told us that scrolling was an issue we had to face head on.

This problem was made worse by the fact that many AOL members have older computers still set at 800 x 600 screen resolution, so even less was visible on their screens.

We engaged the AOL member education team to write about the new look of AOL News and to show, with screen shots, what’s at the top and bottom of the page when you scroll. (We should have repeated that communication several times, because post-launch surveys showed some members still did not realize that their favorite news sections, which used to be visible on their screens, are now below the scroll line.)

Another part of our launch planning was pre- and post-polls. (Scientific surveys with randomly selected members were coming later.) On the day before our changeover, we attached an instant poll to the main News page. Poll questions focused on attitudes toward AOL News – Is it complete? Is it timely? Is it fair? etc. – and on satisfaction with AOL News. Three weeks after our relaunch in HTML, we posted the same instant poll at the same time of day on the same day of the week. Together, both polls had more than 100,000 respondents. The comparison of the pre-change and post-change responses was heartening. Opinions concerning the new look of AOL News were generally more positive than those toward the old AOL News. (Admittedly, we don’t know if the pre- and post-change polls represent a change in the first group’s opinions.)

We have a lot more to learn about producing HTML pages. One of our biggest questions is what’s the optimum number of related-content or related-items boxes that readers will use and find helpful? Or does that vary according to story topic, making editors’ roles are all the more important?

Answers to these questions will help inform how we shift the roles of editors into becoming multimedia producers. With that term, I don’t mean that AOL News editors will go out and shoot video or audio, but they will need to be experts at how and when to use it.

Is it journalism if a newsroom doesn’t have reporters?

Local newspaper, radio or television online sites did not initially consider AOL News or Yahoo! News anything to worry about. Journalists at traditional media still have a hard time taking seriously a news organization that doesn’t have reporters. At face value, I don’t blame them. A news organization without reporters initially sounds like an oxymoron.

While the leaders of online news sites kept dismissing the fact that in many of their communities, more people read news on AOL than on their local news site, AOL News kept hiring their journalists and increasing our overall audience. In the past four years, AOL News has grown from about nine million unique users a month to an average of 23 million.

Working as editors at AOL News are 20-year veterans of AP and Reuters, the former vice president and editor-in-chief of USA TODAY.com, former editors from washingtonpost.com, CNN.com, TIME.com, CBSNews.com and many with newspaper, radio and TV experience.

These editors have the best editing job in the world. For the largest online news audience, they select stories from the best journalism sources to create a unified package of articles, audio, video, photos, polls, message boards and chat rooms to create a one-stop-shop of the best of journalism’s best.

If you had read online news Listserv comments from four or five years ago, you would have found many journalists flat out asserting, with total conviction and no doubt whatsoever, that the employees (They couldn’t call them journalists.) at AOL News did not do journalism.

What they do is no different from what a wire editor at say, The Denver Post, has done for decades, yet no one says that wire editor is not a journalist. That wire editor might have 12 columns to fill. He or she has no reporters, so the space is filled with wire copy, probably from only one or two wire services. That editor might decide to further illustrate a story with a photo or a chart sent by the same wire services. The wire editor would select the stories, order them for importance, impact and newsworthiness, display them in way that indicates their relative importance and write the headlines and the captions. No one – at that paper or any other – believes that what the wire editor does is not journalism.

At AOL News, we do that job in a way few others in the world can, because of our news partnerships. AOL News editors create packages with mainbars, sidebars, multimedia and interactivity from a list of sources that leads the way in journalism:

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal
• USA TODAY
• CNN
• ABC
• TIME
• The Christian Science Monitor
• AP
• Reuters
• Getty Photos
• Corbis Photos
• AFP Photos
• Numerous others in the business, entertainment and sports categories

Now, the online editor’s role is evolving into being the producer of a news experience that might talk back to you, show you pictures or suck you in with a poll or a quiz. That’s all the more reason why we should not get carried away with automation. Besides selecting which stories to feature, AOL News editors enhance those stories into self-standing media presentations: the one-stop-shop of the best of journalism’s best.