George Pyle: Shifting to a web-based universe

Kinda sorta remember somebody telling me this one time. So it must be true. (Even though I can’t find it on Google. So it’s probably false.)

In the early days of their success, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would take tapes of Rolling Stones songs they had just recorded to a friend of theirs at a London radio station. The DJ would put on the tape, play it on the air, and Mick and Keith would run down to the street, get in the junky car one of them still drove and listen to the recording on the car’s non-stereo AM radio.

Not the best way to appreciate a recording? No. And that was the point.

Most of the people who would hear that song would hear it on that same kind of radio. They certainly would never hear it played back in the state-of-the-art (at the time, four-track) recording studio. A great many of them would never even buy the record. At least not until after they had heard, and liked, the song on the radio. 

So what each song sounded like on that most basic form of communication was, for all intents and purposes, what the song sounded like. And the final version had to be mixed in a way that it sounded good — or, if you are not a Stones fan, right — on a Japanese transistor radio.

Which is why I have heard some people complain that the new Salt Lake Tribune website looks kind of goofy. It is probably because you are looking at it on the 21st century version of the recording studio — your giant desktop Mac or PC — when the site has in large measure been engineered to be seen on the progeny of portable radios — mobile devices like an iPhone or a Galaxy.

Because, if current trends hold, that is how nearly all of us are going to be looking at nearly everything in the near future.

On a phone, or tablet, the pages are more vertical, with elements stacked on top of one another. Photos that look huge on the desktop are more digestible on a phone, and all that blank area off to the sides (in my one design class, all those years ago, they called it ”creative white space”) goes away.

If any of that bothers you desktop users, an old (by internet standards) trick is to skinny up the window your browser is in. Make it as tall as it can be but only half as wide. Our site can tell what size screen, or window, you are using at any given moment and accommodates it. The type is still larger and easier to read than it is on an iPhone, and I think it is the best of both worlds.

So much for form. Now, content.

As more and more news and commentary content migrates to the online universe, those of us who run the Tribune’s Opinion section are seriously contemplating something I’ve long thought about but, until now, resisted — content that is online only, never in print.

Actually I’ve been doing that for years with the various syndicated columns the Tribune subscribes to. We get enough of those efforts — from Dana Milbank, Catherine Rampell, E.J. Dionne, George F. Will, etc. — that there is nowhere near enough space on our print pages for even a fraction of them. Those paper pages are increasingly filled up by local folks whose thoughts are at least as important as anything the pros from Dover have to say. So, because those folks don’t live here and won’t get their feelings hurt, they often go online only, so they can be read without taking up more of the small space in the daily newspaper.

For the local writers, though, it has still been pretty print-focused. If they aren’t on the page, they aren’t on the site. The same for people who write into the Public Forum, our name for the traditional letters to the idiot, er, editor spot.

And that can be a problem sometimes when the traffic is heavy — election seasons, during the Utah legislative session, any time Donald Trump has done something stupid. Stuff sits in the electronic bin until it’s too old to make sense and then gets moved, reluctantly, to the category marked ”Trash.”

So now I am contemplating a system where the qualifying columns and letters will be processed and posted online more or less as they roll in, with the decision as to which ones will go in the print paper made afterward. That is based on the new thinking that online only is not second-class status behind print. That way our online readership, which is growing, will see just about everything we get and our print readership, which is shrinking, will see a sampling of what is, in my subjective view, some representative highlights.

Some of the online-only content will be flagged on the print page in a new feature called More Views. Cross-promotion, you know.

Nothing has been decided yet. And, even when it is, we can always change our minds and do it differently tomorrow. That was always the beauty of putting out a daily newspaper. And it is the good part of an constantly updated website.

Let me know what you think.

George Pyle, the Tribune’s editorial page editor, has already forgotten what the old Tribune website looked like. gpyle@sltrib.com