E-Media Tidbits

chicagotribune.com The new ChicagoTribune.com: Easier to use, more interactive.

Most news site redesigns these days seem to emphasize interactivity and social media. This redesign seems more traditional (old-fashioned?) in nature. It's neat. It's clean. But you have to scroll down a bit to reach the blogs, video and most viewed/most e-mailed features.

It certainly isn't USA Today, with its equal emphasis on social networking and reader input and opinion, or The Guardian Unlimited, which is very strong on blogging thanks to the efforts of Kevin Anderson.

ChicagoTribune.com still requires registration, of course. If you were already registered, reregistering isn't necessary (nor can I see any reason why it would be).

Innovation Editor Bill Adee has a helpful rundown on the changes as well as a blog. There's a six-slide tour of the site, an FAQ, and a reader survey. Again, pretty straight-forward, normal stuff.

There's an emphasis on ease of use (home page tabs, classified search tools, entertainment search tools), breaking news (time stamps, daily e-mail news briefs and alerts, mobile alerts), interactivity (ratings/comments/most popular/user photos/blogs), photos and video.

Again, if there's anything new or ground-breaking here, I'm missing it. It's just neatly and nicely done -- which is valuable in itself. A catch-up effort, it seems to me.