Call it fashion week for the news industry. This month, three major American journalism shops have said they will be redesigning their websites: Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.
Both Reuters and the Times have offered glimpses of their new designs, and there’s something strikingly similar about them: Each has a thin, white navigation bar at the top with a seriously pared-down list of things to click on.
Check out Reuters’ new look, for example:
It’s much more basic than what’s currently at the top of Reuters.com—a two-tiered bar with separate buttons for sharing on Facebook and Twitter and 12 links to different areas of the site.
Similarly, the New York Times has designed a much simpler navigation bar with a single button providing access to the paper’s sections (as opposed to the current site, which has a long list in the lefthand column).
The current top of the Times’ site is also littered with advertisements and multiple links to subscribe to home delivery of the paper.
The thin, white, and simplified navigation bars in both the Reuters and Times redesigns have a similar look to the relatively new navigation bar of Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports news website.
The Wall Street Journal hasn’t revealed anything about its makeover yet, but surely its next navigation bar will be a lot less cluttered than its current one. Maybe it’ll even be white and thin.
