Reuters' former Next Web system

Sep 19, 2013 - Nieman Journalism Lab - Reuters nixes Next: Failed redesigns and the challenge of expanding a digital audience

May 2013 story

May 2013 Every page is your homepage: Reuters, untied to print metaphor, builds a modern river of news

Dave Winer: Here’s why every news organization should have a river

Reuters Next: http://preview.reuters.com

Excerpts from the above stories:

Reuters unveiled a preview site for the future look and design of Reuters.com. It’s a river-of-news type of approach that mirrors the flow of data on one of Reuters terminals, but has also become increasingly popular in the era of social media.

The stream approach has become somewhat fashionable in the world of news, said Daniele Codega, design director for Reuters Digital, partially because audiences (and publishers too) no longer have a fear of scrolling. (Some, like Quartz, have built an entire navigation hierarchy around scrolling rather than clicking.)

In an era when many newspapers and magazines are using typography and layout to make their apps look like their print product, Reuters — with no print edition to ape — is instead making its website look a lot like its new apps, building a consistent experience across platforms.

Roberts said news sites homepages are still a powerful driver of traffic, but the tide is shifting in another direction. “The days where you could drive big portion of audience to any single page? That’s pretty much done,” he said. The media have to be willing to adapt to changing times, Roberts said, and that means having a highly adaptable website and apps.

So much cool tech behind http://preview.reuters.com , I have to share: 1. RESTful API outputting assets as JSON.

One custom built CMS controls API and all client-facing apps.

Hosted on Amazon cloud, no more big iron datacenter for Reuters News.

Much of back-end built in Python and associated technologies.

Oh yeah, we used MongoDB too.