Traditional newspapers come out once or twice a day after having come to a final publishable version.
With online news there is never a final version, news is always in flux and can be edited at any time.
With Zeitgeist we wanted to show this changing of news by bringing it back to a traditional newspaper format.
Using different design treatments we created a number of articles looking at characteristics of online news.
Zeitgeist was awarded the Items/Spinhex & Industrieprijs 2006, in Items Magazine and a Silver at the Kolla Award 2007.
Foxnews.com Top Story
We recorded the front page of Foxnews.com for 24 hours and extracted the changes happening to their front page article.
Deletions are shown with red strikethroughs and additions are inverted.
A story told in headlines
An analysis of two days worth of headlines from different sources about one story. This treatment was inspired by how online news sources are beginning to optimize their headlines for search engines such as Google.
For this article we generated 123 weights of one font. Every time a word is used again the word is made lighter by one weight. This way unoriginal headlines slowly disappear (old news) and new unused words are bold.
Wikinews.org article evolving
An article on the death of Milosevic is shown evolving from a tiny article to a detailed account during 8 days.
Wikinews is a collaborative online news site which allows anyone to add or edit news stories.
News feed publishing rhythms
UN Member states admit, deny & accuse
Using RSS we recorded the history of what headlines were published and when during a 24 hour period of different news sources.
By placing the headlines vertically according to the time they were published we created a kind of DNA fingerprint for every source.
A Google News search for headlines that include the names of the UN members states in combination with the verbs “admit”, “deny” and “accuse”.
When there are results an article is created out of these headlines.