Turning every article page into a “front door” for the site

Bleacher Report CEO Brian Grey passed along this Nieman Journalism Lab story about Reuters’ coming website redesign, which is based on the idea of a “river” of stories, and moves away from the idea of a front page to the site.

That’s the kind of different, innovative company Bleacher Report is: The CEO actually makes himself useful!

Here’s NiemanLab.org’s Justin Ellis writing about the Reuters preview site:

Go to an article page and you find that you’re actually placed in the middle of a larger stream of content—scroll up or down and you’ll find your story’s text actually lives in a bifurcated version of the Reuters front page. If every page is your homepage, why not treat them all like one?

Check out this story from last week about the support Jason Collins got after he came out as gay. If you scroll up or down, you see older or newer stories about Collins and, beyond that, about the wider topic of “Gay Rights.”

As a user, when you come to this story, you’re not isolated on a story page, with a few teasers for other stories on the margins. You are drawn into the mix of the site’s offerings, just as you would be if you landed on the site cover. That’s what Ellis means above by “every page is your homepage.”

Bleacher Report thinks of story pages in much the same way. The site cover is still important, but we want the vast number of readers who reach B/R through social media, search, newsletters and Team Stream to have just as rewarding an experience as if they’d gone to the front page.

Grey, the CEO, calls this “the evolution of the ‘article page’ as the living, breathing, real-time new ‘front door’ that we know it is for readers/viewers.”

Just as we—and others—are rethinking the article, making it more visually compelling, more dynamic, we and others are also rethinking the article page’s role. The way people consume content is changing at breakneck speed. We—all of us—have to change right along with it.