The Tea Makers

Preliminary critiques calling Newsworld’s new look “CNN-ish” were only partly right.

To be sure, there are a lot of similarities there. For the CBC, there are now more things on the screen, and more things moving on the screen. The differences, it seems, are in the details.

Gone are the rounded corners, fades, and purple and gold of yore:

The controversial news crawl is here to stay (was there really any doubt?):

but is smaller than before (and smaller than CNN’s) and greyed out a bit, making it easier for the eye to ignore. But if you do want to read it, the uppercase letters make it uncomfortable, and some of the spacing between letters is off, particularly around the “S” and “A.”

The topic for the currently crawling news is posted to the right of the crawl itself, giving the news some context, a trick nicked from the BBC:

It’s a good idea, but a bit awkward on the CBC, as English is read left-to-right, and the topic should probably be to the left of the news it’s referring to. And again, the letter spacing on this is off. Too squished.

This whole middle bar is bigger and deeper than anything else on any news network, which is a bold choice:

It gives a lot of room for context, but I can see viewers complaining about it. It’s big and brass, treading into CNN territory:

But this being the “headline,” I suppose its confidence is justified, and where CNN will often run some kind of animation behind it, or animate the words themselves, the CBC’s stays true and steady and easy to read.

However, it all really starts to fall apart up top:

Where it looks like everything left over is just tossed on, taking up valuable screen space.

Do we really need to cycle through the current time for every zone in Canada? I would say: “No.” Sometimes it just says “cbc.ca,” telling viewers to turn off the TV and go the computer. I smell some viewer complaints coming on.

Do we really need to be told this is a “live update” that is “live?” Again, I don’t think so. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt, this being the first day, and hope that the practice won’t continue. But if it were up to me, I would put “live” somewhere in the big bar in the middle, and scrap the time altogether.

Which is exactly what they’ve done on the regular network, which looks cleaner to me:

While Newsworld‘s news (and time zone) junkies get all the value added:

It’s not going to win any awards for originality, but overall, it’s good. Handsome and functional. Which is, I assume, why CNN uses it. While less distinctive than the old look, it’s consistent and closer to the CBC brand, as promised. It also strikes me as very web-inspired, with its economy of space ruled by the grid.

That it is good is even more commendable when you know that it was done in-house on a frugal budget in a short time. Not long ago this would have been outsourced at great expense.

As part of its debut, CBC News Editor-in-Chief Tony Burman launched an online-only, weekly column on media issues, where “responses are intended to contribute to a conversation.” Say what you want about Tony, but the boy can write and he has a lot of interesting things to say.

And now he’s a CBC blogger.