The Guardian Exposes the Three Little Pigs in Open Journalism Promo

The Guardian - Open Journalism: Three Little PigsMy first exposure to the Three Little Pigs story was the Disney-ized version that was first released in 1933. In that version the wolf escapes at the end with nothing more than a scalded butt. For some reason I had never realized that in the original version has the Big bad Wolf being boiled alive after sneaking down the chimney.of the third little pig.

UK news organization The Guardian has re-imagined how the events of The Three Little Pigs fairy tale might be reported in 2012 using the concept of open journalism. From the gripping newspaper and website headline ‘Big Bad Wold Boiled Alive’, to the conversations and reactions being shared on social media sites.

The Guardian take the story beyond the ‘they lived happily ever after’ fairy tale ending into a story of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud due to the struggles of the pigs to make their mortgage payments. Then the people take to the streets…

You can read more about open journalism from The Guardian’s Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger.

Sun Media Launches Bold Redesign of News Websites

Toronto Sun RedesignSun Publications has launched a bold new redesign of their newspaper websites in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary. The sites were launched this week and designed by the UX and Creative team at Qubecor Media owned Nurun.

The default view for the new home page features a large eye-catching photo in the top banner. The top news stories are presented in a vertical mosaic of photos that are easy to scan as you scroll. Each image features a link to a ‘Quick View’ option of the story showing a picture, headline and a few paragraphs of the story in a popup view that can be closed without leaving the home page underneath. The number of comments made on a story is also viewable on the image, as is the link to go to the full story.

The home page can actually be viewed in two ways, as the mosaic view or as a list featuring a headline and thumbnail. The list view can be further filtered by news section.

The photo mosaic design is repeated on the home pages of each news section with the subsections presented in well separated groupings of featured stories.

The main navigation features a large dropdown of secondary navigation areas as well as hot topics, featured and latest stories. This combined with the mosaic view allows the majority of top news stories across all news sections to be a single click away.

I find the site very easy to navigate, and the ability to visually scan the top stories is the great product of the redesign.

What are your thoughts on the redesign?