It’s been just over three months since Matt inaugurated the VentureBeat Life Sciences page, so I thought I’d take a moment to ask our readers for your thoughts. From the beginning, my goal has been to offer an analytical perspective on the workings of the venture biotechnology and medical-device industries, and to connect that on one side to the scientific advances that underlie them and on the other to larger issues that confront the life sciences — for instance, healthcare reform, drug and device approval regulation, and the treatment of patents and intellectual property.
A few months ago I also took on responsibility for covering life-science funding announcements, and the site has probably tilted a bit too heavily to the news-brief side ever since. I’m not particularly happy about that, and I’m working to strike a better balance between the often straightforward news briefs and longer pieces. In part, I just need to rein in my inclination to dig into unclear or incomplete announcements, since the payoff often isn’t worth the extra effort, and it takes time away from other posts I could be writing.
We’re also aiming to make the site as easy to read, navigate and comment on as possible. Some changes along those lines are already in place, and more should be on the way. Last week, for instance, our crack tech team eliminated the code that forced every post to “jump” after 10-12 lines. In addition, I’ve started pushing the text of news-brief items “below the fold,” so that you won’t see more than a headline unless you click on the “Read More” link. (To my surprise, this even works for RSS readers; I’d erroneously assumed yesterday that it wouldn’t.)
With luck, these changes will reduce the “clutter” created by news briefs while making the more important stories stand out. It could even spur my productivity, since there’s suddenly a lot more white space to fill. In any event, we’ll be continuing to tweak things going forward, so don’t hesitate to let us know what you think about the changes so far and things you’d like to see in the future. Feel free to sound off in comments.
2 Comments
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Sorry, ought not give my full name said:
Thoughtful commentary, even if it’s only one posting a day, is more welcome. I’ve stopped reading most summaries-only blogs — who cares?
But why don’t you cluster the newsbriefs into once/twice a week summaries? It’s good to see the ones I’d otherwise miss. You could even do ‘em thematically (wed the device companies, fri the pharma+bio or something like that.
Oh, and I hate title-only news feeds. What’s the point? If the feed contains summary (perhaps the first paragraph) then at least I can decide if I want to click over to the whole thing. If it’s title only, then I presume the author just wants me to click on everything, rather than giving me enough to decide. In that case I assume the author isn’t that interested in interesting content, just page views..and stop reading the blog altogether.
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David Hamilton said:
Thanks for your comment. I’ve already been thinking about corralling some of the briefer funding news into roundups — among other things, it’s a lot more time-efficient on my side as well — so that’s something you may see more of going forward. Grouping them thematically is a pretty good idea, too, if we decide to go that way.
I am curious, though, whether having briefs up on the site in a timely fashion — and often as not with at least a little analysis — is at all useful to you and other readers. As someone whose roots are in daily journalism, I’m reluctant to step back from the news flow unless the briefs really aren’t adding anything, or of course if they’re actively taking away from the site’s value.
As for the feed, I should clarify that I’m not talking about changing it over to title-only — I hate those sorts of feeds, too. All I’ve done is to make some of the shorter funding-related newsbriefs “title-only” by forcing a jump right after the headline. Longer items (like this one) should still be running at length — if they’re not, that’s something we need to look into. The idea is to spare casual readers from having to scroll past several boilerplate-ish briefs to get to something more interesting.
