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Comment by rjd | Hacker News Reader

Also probably worth mentioning while on the subject all my research and experience added up to designs that are very close to Al Jeezera.

Perhaps I just favor it because it resembles my own thinking but I believe they have one of the best designed news sites out there: http://english.aljazeera.net

Clean, crisp, clear, all gridded up nice and tidy. Handling information overload well.

Being a new kid on the block, no legacy systems or clients to contended with, learning from every one else's mistakes I assume play a huge part in why Al Jeezera looks so good.

If I can remember the worst news site I've seen I'll post it. Its a state level TV station from America somewhere, shocking abuses in design. It was like trying to read at a pocket dictionary from 10 feet away, total text chaos.

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One of the best online newspaper designs I've seen recently is the Indian paper The Hindu (http://www.thehindu.com/). While most Indian newspapers will give you eye-cancer just by looking at them (ex: The Times of India, which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country also has one of the most horrible online editions, plastered with spammy ads and horrible layout). The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. (The original design was like a 1995 webpage)

Also up there in my list is NPR (http://www.npr.org/) and PBS (http://www.pbs.org/). Not technically newspapers, but their pages are mostly about news delivery.

The Hindu looked bad too, a couple of years ago. They started testing a new interface at beta.thehindu.com for sometime before using the new interface for everyone.

The Hindu has always been a bit of a boring (some might call it lack of sensationalism) but it's got an excellent new redesign. True.

I think they've learnt a lot from BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ (also in terms of how they coverage news).

Edit: http://www.bbc.co.uk might be even better example of a good news site design.

Of course the BBC doesn't have to deal with advertising. I'm assuming why their site is so "clean".

I love having images to scan instead of just headlines (which Andy seems to detest), so when my local newspaper redesigned their page, I fell in love http://www.sydsvenskan.se/ (Swedish)

Breaking news at the very top, then a top story, then the other top 4 stories. Then a simple scrolling list of the latest news by time descending (great when you check in a few times a day).

Of course, as a local paper they have a lot less content making it a much easier job than something on the scale of the NYT.

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