Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

El Tiempo (a highly respected newspaper from Colombia) has an interesting new top-level category (it looks like it’s new from 2 days ago) called “Tierras y ganados” (”lands and cattle”). Colombia is partly an agricultural society in which the rich own most of the land.

El Diario NY (a NYC Spanish newspaper) has an interesting category in between “local”, “national” and “international” news. It is aimed at the immigrant population, and added a category called “nuestros paises” (”our countries”).

The New York Times, like most newspapers, has most of the generic categories, a few local ones (”Washington”, “New York/Region”) and the obligatory outlier (”Obituaries“). The NY Times obituaries page is a big thing in the social life of NYC - it indicates who is important. Comments on the relevance of this category are very welcome!

So it seems like newspaper categories follow a predictable pattern: a bunch of basic categories (”Business”, “Technology”, …), a few local geographical categories (”Bogota”, “New York/Region”, …), and a very specific outlier category for each newspaper, which is closely tied to the cultural makeup of the local audience. In Colombia it’s “Land and Cattle”. In NYC (rich white people) it’s “Obituaries” or (Latin immigrants) “Nuestros paises”.

I had only looked at these 3 websites when this pattern emerged. I expect it to hold for others, but no time right now to check :) Comments?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 12th, 2005 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Information architecture, i18n. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.