Diego Basch

I have four news sites on my browser’s bookmark toolbar. Two of them are traditional newspapers and the other two are social news sites. To me the news is like email. It’s something that I check while waiting for another task to complete, and most of the times the result is “nothing new”.

With email, I know what to do with a glance. If I see “Inbox 0″ I switch to another tab immediately and come back later. I realized lately that the news works the same way for me. All I want to know is “is something really important happening right now?”

I can’t do that with Google News. The reason is that they allocate space on the page evenly to headlines with constant font sizes. They could be “The Moon Just Blew Up” or “Tax Deadline Approaching”. I have no immediate way to know how important something is at a glance.

Hand-edited media sites, on the other hand, send an important signal with font size. In a fraction of a second I know what I need without having to read a wall of text. I find it surprising that Google hasn’t figured this out yet. There are many signals they could use as inputs to decide whether to make the font huge or normal. Trendistic is just one of them.