sneak peek: editorial archives
(photo by Here’s Kate)
I wanted to start this morning by giving you guys a little sneak preview of something we’ve been working on for the last few days. Please bear in mind that this is very much a “work in progress” — some sections are incomplete and some areas are missing text. But we thought we’d post it to let you have a look around and maybe offer some feedback.
Over the course of the last five years, eMusic has amassed a wealth of editorial content — artist interviews, album guides, style guides, annotated discographies, you name it. But we’ve always felt a bit hamstrung: after an article has been assigned and completed its homepage run, we really don’t have any place to put it.
So here’s our first, tentative steps toward remedying that problem, a kind of Table of Contents where all editorial will “live” permanently. While we acknowledge that it’s not the best solution necessarily, we do think it’s kind of cool, and allows an opportunity for our members to browse five years worth of eMusic editorial.
We’re in the process of constructing these for all genres, but I wanted to post the two we’ve finished.
The first is our Alt-Punk Table of Contents. From here, you’ll be able to navigate off to other subsections of Alt-Punk Editorial — Dozens, Six Degrees, Icons etc. We’re still in the process of building some of these sublevels, but this is what the top level will look like. There will be one of these for each genre.
The next section we’ve finished is a page collecting every interview with every Alt-Punk artist we’ve done since 2004. You can browse those here. There will be a similar page for every non-interview Alt-Punk feature (and Blues feature and Jazz feature and so on).
So, as I’ve said, this is still a work in progress, but we thought we’d let you have a look around and see what we’ve done so far. Feel free to chime in with feedback!
UPDATE: Just finished every non-interview alt/punk piece and the jazz table of contents. Again, still working out the bugs, but thought we’d let you peek.
I like it. I’ve mentioned a few times that there needs to be a quick and convenient way to access the hubs. This looks like it will provide a valuable platform.
Yup! The hubs will definitely be incorporated.
Those pages are both very nice…but one thing to be careful of is that there’s no obvious link between them. It could be as simple as a “More Q&As” button below the Jay Reatard picon in the “Columns: Interviews and Backstories” box on the first page.
I love the shiny approach, but you should also consider something more barebones. That is, look at the Browse and New Arrivals pages – you can definitely find what you’re looking for.
Here’s my remix of New This Month. Use the article picons as the same way that you do album covers. Then you’ve got the Artist, Article Category (Q&A, Dozens, etc.), Author (Wolk, Keyes, Fritch, to name the ones in the top row), Date….anything else? Then click on any of those to sort.
That’s across the top. Now, on the left nav, I can’t immediately think of anything you need beyond a list of genres and dates (New This Week, Freshly Posted), but that might be enough.
Now imagine how this can work into the Browse interface. A block for music genres, authors, kind of feature, and lots of banners and other ways to spotlight the fresh content.
The big thing from the Browse page that’s missing is star ratings – which brings me to a couple of requests. I’d like to rate these features. I’d also like to comment on them. It might be worth introducing some dots-style moderation, just to keep the “not in my country” weasels away from the Dylan features and such. But I think there’s something to be said for making these a little more interactive. That is, you have previously made these part of the emusic Magazine…but missing the ability to write letters to the editor…so to speak…
Anyway, I’m really pleased to see you guys working on large-scale design initiatives, but I’d like you to also consider some of the lower-impact approaches you can already exploit with existing, proven interfaces, using tags you’ve already applied to the articles. Let the database do some of the heavy lifting.
hey Tim -
Good points! A few answers:
It could be as simple as a “More Q&As” button below the Jay Reatard picon in the “Columns: Interviews and Backstories” box on the first page.
There will be those very links! We’re going to link to the Q&As page from the exact spot you mentioned — we’re still fine-tuning. So we’re on the same page on that one!
Use the article picons as the same way that you do album covers. Then you’ve got the Artist, Article Category (Q&A, Dozens, etc.), Author (Wolk, Keyes, Fritch, to name the ones in the top row), Date….anything else? Then click on any of those to sort.
And for this: stay tuned! That’s definitely something we’ve been working on.
I also want to get comments going on features — even scathing “I hated this interview!” comments are worthwhile to us.
Thanks for the lengthy, considered feedback — really. It goes a long way, and I love hearing from you guys.
Nice. I still miss the music genre newsletters that stopped making it to my yahoo e-mail address (not even in the spam folder).
Nice, this is a good idea! It would be great, also, if there were some alphabetical index somewhere (even if the page were huge, searchability is good) or if each artist page linked to every editorial feature that mentioned that artist. Sorry if those already exist; just an idea.
Thanks for the feedback Brendan !
They look great! I’m glad all those spread sheets finally came to fruition.
You did not get carpal tunnel in vain, Caitlin.
Is this still in the works? A “Table of Contents” for editorial content would be very helpful.
It’s done! It’s 100% done. You can now navigate to all existing editorial through the various genre pages.
We’re working on a “browse editorial” feature that should be rolled out soon, but these visual table of contents are completed, and now occupy the top slot of every genre page.