Australia’s favourite newspaper (ok, I’m biased, I’ve written for them once or twice ;), the Sydney Morning Herald has just unveiled a brand new design!
Personally I like it, though not everyone shares my opinion!
One or two people feel the stylesheet they’ve used isn’t particularly, shall we say, original. I don’t know, 100 per cent original stylesheets are pretty hard to come by in an age of three billion blogs!
If newspaper website design is something that especially interests you, why not chime in to the various discussions on the topic on the Australian INfront forums?
While there is an excessive amount of whitespace that needs to be dealt with, I think it’s the best designed online news site in Oz. I actually really like it. The article pages are especially improved. The thing is, it is such a tough job for the UI designers. Editorial staff and advertising executives are all fighting for space on the front page. A media empire like Fairfax has so many things that need to be squeezed into the interface and accommodated.
Even though I read the print version, I probably read the online version because I prefer its design over the other local online news services.
While I’m not really one to talk about white space, I don’t it’s tooooo bad at SMH. But agree with your point about UI design, it’d be a bugger of a job to have!