Howard Owens on Web 3.0

An interesting comment in a recent post from Howard Owens, whose porfolio includes overseeing new media in Ventura County, Calif., and then Bakersfield:

I've also got to admit that I'm no longer convinced that headlines without story summaries is what the readers really want or will drive the most clicks. Of course, this is a bigger problem when news rooms won't rewrite headlines for the Web. For example, the headline in this story is "Mr. Mom." Without a subhead or summary, the headline doesn't really work as a link. It offers too little information about the subject of the story.

Which is interesting, because Bakersfield was one of the newspaper pioneers in Web 3.0, the more minimalist treatment of sites. At the time, Owens acknowledged backchannel the potential problem of the presssure these designs put on newsrooms to rewite the heds for the Web.

My thought continues to be that we are in a 10-year transition inside newsrooms in terms of developing new workflows and graduating from schools like mine the students who are thinking about such things. (You'd be surprised how few students in your modern j-school do have a good grasp of what's happening out there. I base this on my observations of my students and conversations with other professors. But it is coming, slowly.)

Owens talks at length about Evansville and the new Scripps Howard redesigns. Worth reading. In fact, it's always worth reading his blog.