Crosscut version 1.1
We've made improvements to help you browse and find things more easily.
Welcome to Crosscut version 1.1. We've been in business not quite four months, and we've learned a lot in that short time, much of it from your comments and suggestions. The changes you see reflect just some of that. Crosscut will always be a work in progress, and we've already got plans for further refinements. For now we hope you'll find these improvements useful. Please let us know.
We haven't changed a core feature of Crosscut – guiding you to the best journalism and most important news in the "great nearby" of our Northwest, saving you the trouble of having to visit dozens of Web sites. Early each day, I and three other editors scan the region and summarize the news for you. And we post lots of original articles by our own writers and contributors, which appear on the home page under the Crosscurrent heading.
To our pleasant surprise, there are lots more excellent stories out there than we first thought, so much so that Crosscut has come to seem a little crowded and overwhelming to some readers. Let me explain how we now make it easier to navigate.
Crosscut's secret sauce is our categorization of everything by subject matter.
Everything we post – our own articles as well as headlines linking to content on other sites – is assigned at least one topic, and usually a handful. There are a number of terms for this; we prefer topic, but other sites might calls these tags, keywords, or categories.
For example, this article by Chris Vance about how the Republican Party can reinvent itself was assigned these topics: Washington, Washington Legislature, Washington Governor, Washington Agencies, and Politics/Government. As of this writing, there are more than 100 topics on Crosscut, and every one of them has its own home page, where the articles are displayed with the most recent ones on top. (You can browse topic home pages on our search page.)
So once we've found important news for you, there are two things Crosscut editors do: First, we write a really informative headline so you know what you're getting when you click. Many of these headlines also have a short further explanation of the story, written by us, which appears when you put your cursor over the headline without clicking (known as a "mouse-over"). Second, we assign topics to the item so you can find it later, through search or browsing. This human involvement in selecting the stories and then organizing them by topic is something automated sites like Google News don't give you.
More specifically, here's what we've changed on Crosscut in version 1.1:
Sitewide
New top-of-the-page navigation. The blue menus at the top of every page are now organized by topic. These menus drop down to reveal a list of regular features or subjects. Click on a subject and you go to that subject's home page.
Improvements to Top of the News. This is the left-column guide to what we nominate as the best journalism and most important news of the day. To get more headlines in view, we've hidden the article descriptions you used to see. To view an article description, move your mouse cursor over a headline. (You will find this new "mouse-over" feature elsewhere on the site, too.)
Also, you can now browse previous Top of the News editions by clicking on the date at the top of the column and choosing a different day from a pop-up calendar.
Most popular, most talked about. Farther down the left column you'll find two new features, listing the most popular and most-commented-on stories by Crosscut authors.
Home Page
Short Cuts column. The third column of our home page is now called Short Cuts, where we list the most recent headlines for content "inside" the site – including regular columns or blogs, and popular topics. You can now see more on the home page of what's elsewhere on Crosscut, and you're more likely to find a good story that appeared a few days earlier and you overlooked. (We hope you check Crosscut every day, but of course many don't, so we want our non-daily readers to easily find on the home page headlines for the best stories of the past few days.)
A more-prominent Clicker. At the top of Short Cuts is a sampling of Clicker, our popular Northwest headline service. Clicker provides a deeper and broader scan of stories than Top of the News, drawing from sites all across the region, including blogs, national and international media, research sources, etc. It is updated all through the day, as news breaks or as we find new sources of information. Clicker still has its own page, but we've put the most important and most recent headlines on the home page for quick reference.
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jul 26, 8:04 a.m. inappropriate
The solution is to empty the cache (in the Safari menu) and reload the page.
If you are having this problem in other browsers, try clearing your cache or refresh the page several times.
Posted Thu, Jul 26, 9:04 a.m. inappropriate
The Piper
Posted Thu, Jul 26, 9:50 a.m. inappropriate
ctrl f5 for windows users: if your browser has cached the old version of the site and the page is jumbled, press ctrl F5 to manually refresh your cache.
Posted Thu, Jul 26, 12:44 p.m. inappropriate
2.00: Score two points for Crosscut - or $2.00, if your preferences run in such a direction.
Let's hope the team puts together a winning score!
-D
Posted Thu, Jul 26, 1:52 p.m. inappropriate
Purposive Evolution: Crosscut 1.1 is really splendid. And it's constructed in a way that forces it to become even more powerful, prescient, and user-friendly.
Can you copyright the design, and later versions/enhacements of it? If you can, you should.
Others will attempt to copy or steal features and innovations from this especially user-friendly website design.
Maybe Crosscut 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 will be Beta tests for what an Internet Information Service ought to be -- at last going beyond just links to/facsimiles of hard copy, or mere access to streaming audio of webcasts.
And the way 1.1 is evolving demonstrates the potential of collborative interaction between and among producers and users. Increasingly, users will produce and producers will use. In a way that's not possible with hard copy of MSNBC online or CNN online.
This is a true advance into an appropriately constructed and webbed "information service" (beyond "news").
It lets the user access detail at any desired level. It makes links more purposive and the material linked more accessible.
Posted Thu, Jul 26, 6:54 p.m. inappropriate
Some additional feature requests: I'm hoping we'll also see the following features in Crosscut 1.1:
1) More writing from the likes of Mr. Raban.
2) Fewer multi-part essays from Republican party operatives.
Posted Thu, Jul 26, 8:24 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Some additional feature requests: Duly noted. The multi part.
Posted Fri, Jul 27, 8:44 a.m. inappropriate
Nothing like a robust diversity of POV's to spark thinking and honest debate.
The Piper
Posted Fri, Jul 27, 9:32 a.m. inappropriate
Wednesday, I could scroll down the Crosscut home page and find a link to David Postman's blog. Thursday I couldn't. In your article explaining the new format, Chuck, there was a link to Newstand that got me where I wanted to go, but...and it may be because I look mostly out of my "right" eye...where is the link to Newstand on your home page? And why can' those other links to, say, Postman, et al, stay on the home page?
The less clicks necessary, the better. To paraphrase George Orwell, "One click good. Two, three, four, or more bad."
The Piper
Posted Fri, Jul 27, 7:54 p.m. inappropriate
--We had better things to do with that space.
-- Google doesn't like pages with a lot of static links, so it was hurting our ranking.
So that list now resides on Newsstand and our search page.
From the home page, you can access Newsstand from the far-right top menu, "Search/Site Tools."
I'm giving some thought to making that list of links easier to find.
Posted Mon, Jul 30, 11:04 a.m. inappropriate
How about Crosscut 2.0 - The Balance Version: Like others who have posted since the launch, I had such great hopes for this venture. Yet what I've been reading is a plethora of articles by white, urban, moderate-to-conservative middle class males who are hostile to transit. What gives? Kimberly Marlowe, covering from Portland, seems to be the only female in your midst of gorillas. Oh, we have the occasional female-written article covering fashion (puh-leez). What's up with that? Why not some women writers at Crosscut? Are you guys all threatened? Washington clearly has expressed comfort with females in power, what with a governor and both US Senators, not to mention lots of state and local officials. Several women even head transportation agencies and might provide some perspective on the long-running transportation problems in Puget Sound. I realize that cars are an, uh, "extension" of the male anatomy, but unless you are all overcompensating, let's get some balance.
And speaking of balance, do we have to keep reading all this propaganda from the right wingers and the DLC outcasts? Did all of you get fired from liberal elected officials or something? Are you all losing candidates still annoyed that, after raising a quarter-million bucks you still couldn't beat a 40 watt-bulb? Balance. It's all I ask.
Posted Mon, Jul 30, 2:56 p.m. inappropriate
Remember, this is a town and Crosscut has an audience that thinks Jim McDermott is mainstream...
And I'm not talking "Republican" since the Dan Evans Wing of the party still has devotees despite the best efforts of those of us on the dark side who are members of the Great Right Wing Conspiracy (or right wing nut, as I was recently characterized in a currently posted Crosscut comment).
When you see an article in Crosscut with a byline of Stefan Sharkansky or Kirby Wilbur or, perish the thought, The Piper, then you'll know that Chuck and the gang have finally got it "right." Until then, don't mistake a modicum of difference on a left or Democratic tilting spectrum with so-called moderate-to-conservative points of view.
You want balance? Then breed Sound Politics into Crosscut and watch their children grow!
The Piper