N.Y. Yankees score with Web site; newspapers could, too

Jon Katz
First Amendment Center scholar

09.16.99

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Yankees.com is a home run, a beautifully conceived Web site that blends technology, interactivity and information architecture, and that brings a musty old cultural tradition like baseball into the Digital Age.

Media people, take note.

Venerated print and text industries like journalism and publishing are almost desperately trying to figure out how to respond to the Internet. Their urgency is at least an improvement on the favored solution of the late '80s and '90s: throwing up clunky, non-interactive Web pages known online as "shovelware."

Print media have spent countless millions of dollars rushing to establish these generally dreary online versions. Imagine how much better newspapers and magazines would be if they'd spent the same money hiring staff, improving graphics and modernizing their news coverage? And used the Web to draw some new readers?

Meanwhile, no book publisher has yet produced a striking, effective or innovative Web site. Inside publishing houses, publicists and marketing consultants emphasize the importance of placing stories on the relatively tiny Slate and the more-trafficked and interactive Salon.com (both of which attract an infinitesmal fraction of Net and Web traffic).

Beyond that lazy impulse, they don't seem to have a clue as to how to use the Net or what it might mean for them down the road. Ten years ago, this lack of imagination was understandable; these days, with Grandma likely to be online downloading videostreaming software, there's less excuse.

Only a handful of news organizations — the San Jose Mercury News' Mercurycenter.com, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and USA TODAY — have broken through, establishing themselves as truly interactive (sometimes even profitable), not just traditional media organizations with URLs. The huge difference is interactivity. And sensitivity — knowing and fighting for Web users.

From e-trading to eBay, the lessons of the Web are that if you give people new means of connecting with the products, advertising or information they want, they will come.

Information architecture and design, therefore, have become critically important to companies making the transition to the virtual world. Web information is complicated, write Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, published by O'Reilly ($24 U.S.), one of the most accessible, coherent and useful guides to the principles of Web design. You can't create a Web site that works, the authors argue, until you understand the basic principles of Web architecture and use, any more than you can design great buildings without real-world architecture.

"You can't become a proficient Web site architect unless you first know what it's like to really use the Web on a regular basis," write Rosenfeld and Morville. A site, they suggest, must grow from a carefully planned information architecture for users to be successful in finding pages and accomplishing tasks. Confused users, lost users and unhappy users can quickly turn into former users or none at all.

"In other words, the best Web site producer is an experienced consumer. You must become the toughest, most critical consumer of Web sites you possibly can. Determining what you love, what you hate, and why, will shape your own personal Web design philosophy ... ."

This statement invokes the strikingly revamped Yankees site, a boon not only to the baseball team's fans, but more significantly a model of the kind of consumer empathy, design and understanding Rosenfeld and Morville are talking about.

Yankees.com shows how a well-designed, interactive site can make a traditional product (a ball game, a book, a newspaper) more accessible and appealing, instead of simply more digital.

Amazon.com has generated enormous publicity and confusion in the media and business world (it has yet to make money), but much of Amazon's success flows from the fact that it was designed by planners who understood the Web. Its architecture, especially at its inception, was simple and user-friendly, designed very much with Web browsers in mind. Yankees.com does the same thing, but with more relevance to institutions trying to leap into the Digital Age.

In design, concept and architecture, Yankees.com shows how connectivity can reinforce name-brand institutions, using the Net to hook them up with old and new customers. It follows Rosenfeld's and Morville's advice to seriously ponder what the target audience likes about the Web and doesn't, and then to incorporate a lot of the former and eliminate a lot of the latter.

Major League baseball is curiously analogous to journalism and publishing in a lot of odd ways: an older institution, threatened by ferocious competition from new forms of entertainment and information technologies, from cable wrestling to online gaming. A reactionary institution, like journalism and publishing, it has been bitterly and justifiably criticized for being slow to change, seeing the Web at first as a menace, not a boon.

But what draws consumers to the Web is that it gives them new ways of getting to the things they already love — music, movies, Persian rugs, stocks, TV listings. L.L. Bean was one of the first large retailers to get this; it moved its catalogue business online and created a Web site that was highly user-friendly; it didn't start offering virtual campfires. In fact, it emphasized its traditional virtues — reliability and familiarity — online.

The designers of Yankees.com also understand the importance of figuring out what people most like about the thing you're selling and then using the Web to bring it to them.

In the case of baseball, fans love to yak about their team, follow stats and scores, buy gew-gaws for themselves or their kids, and get tickets. All are radically simple on Yankees.com, a complex site whose dimensions are simple, clearly portrayed and easy to grasp.

First off, the Yankees have made it an interactive delight to buy a ticket. Customers who click on the Box Office icon are linked to a list of upcoming games. They click on the one they want to see and the money they want to spend. They can pull up a seating plan, even see a photo of the field from their prospective seat. By punching in a credit-card number, they can receive tickets (by mail or UPS, ground or next day), or pick them up at the box office).

In addition, they get animated tickers providing news of the latest Yankee games, video "tours" of the team's clubhouse, easy-to-use and very fast forums on which to chat with other fans and ask questions (members have to sign up: Topics are posted and listed and the conversations are surprisingly coherent and civil) and the opportunity to buy Yankee junk. The site is crammed with advertisers.

Just as Rosenfeld and Morville might suggest (what do you hate about the Web?), Yankees.com uses "cookie" and other recognition software to recognize your computer, thus freeing users from the insane and annoying need to memorize ID's and track down passwords and user names.

There's almost nothing in theory more culturally endangered than a baseball game. Why travel long distances, braving crowds, high prices and traffic jams, to watch guys in funny uniforms smack a ball around with a stick? But people's feelings about technology and tradition are complex and unpredictable. It's quite possible for the same person who trawls the Web for hours to want to savor the experience of seeing a baseball game in person. Or to read a book.

What does this have to do with media, journalism or publishing?

A lot. I've yet to encounter a publishing Web site in America that's as interactive, graphically appealing or technically savvy as Yankees.com. The Yankees site requires some relatively sophisticated programs to run its color and animation. The site figures out what programs users will need, links them to the right downloading sites (automatically reading the difference between Macs and PCs), and guides them through the simple downloading process. Building it probably cost a bundle.

But it was a wise investment. The site is intensely participatory, offering users a wide range of options and activities — including news, search engines, Internet access and free e-mail. The Yankees have embraced what journalism and publishing resist so bitterly — interactivity.

Newspapers and publishers have already blown myriad opportunities to draw consumers into their Web sites. Daily news meetings could be simulcast via Webcams — allowing readers to offer their ideas and reactions. Editors retain control, but could also get input. Web sites could guide news consumers through the editorial process — readers could see some stories before and after they were copy-edited, perhaps even be offered the chance to correct factual errors or misconceptions before they appear. They could see the reaction journalists get to their work, offer questions for public officials, and chat live with reporters and editors after major stories or at certain times of the day. Papers could also offer Net access and free e-mail as a way of bringing customers onto their sites, keeping them connected to the newspapers.

Book publishing offers as many opportunities, if not more. Instead of throwing up sluggish and useless promotional Web sites, or mailing books to a handful of snooty literary sites that hardly anyone reads, publishers could draw readers into the process. They could organize Web sites by genres, and bring readers closer to the process of assigning, editing, producing and publishing books.

When a new catalogue is published, a book might automatically get its own corner of the Web site. Interested readers could follow its status — expected print run, scheduled publicity, where the book is being ordered, where the writer is in the production process, what covers are being contemplated and designed. Invisible elements in publishing — designers, for example — could get invaluable feedback from readers on what covers attract them in bookstores, for example.

Publishers could have some fun, too. They could learn if readers would like the author to visit their town, if there's a local group that might be interested in a particular book. Readers could obtain lists of chain and independent outlets where they could buy the book. As with the Yankees' ticket software, they could enter their zip codes and get a list of every bookstore within 20 miles that stocks it. Such a site could also give publishers valuable databases and a better sense of how well a book might do — how many copies to print and distribute — eliminating some of the voodoo guesswork that publishing sales departments rely on.

What the New York Yankees have figured out is that a Web site has to be truly empathetic to and knowledgeable about its users. It has to go to bat for battered Web-browsers snagged and derailed by confusing sites that don't work or that generate more problems than they solve.

It's strange that a baseball team would get this idea while publishers and editors resist it so fiercely. Admitted to the party, given choices, the public rushes to embrace technology and interactivity and uses it to get to the games, books, CDs, movies, hiking boots — and news — it wants.

Excluded and kept at bay, the people move quickly on, almost surely leaving a string of millennial dinosaurs behind.