The Outline designs digital ownership
DECEMBER 5TH, 2016 — POST 329
It’s here. Those of us who’ve kept an eye trained on the work of Joshua Topolsky through his time at The Verge, Bloomberg, and since, The Outline — Topolsky’s newest venture that launched today — is what we’ve been waiting for. When Topolsky took to Medium early this year to proclaim ‘Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved’, and later put forward The Outline as one solution to a corroded media landscape, it was clear that his time since leaving Bloomberg in July of 2015 has been focused on rethinking how a digital media company can operate. As Topolsky writes in The Outline today:
“For far too long the media industrial complex has relied on the crutch of scale and quantity, regurgitative storytelling practices, the strength of other people’s technology and ideas, and a skewed view of its own position in the world.”
“It’s not for everyone. It’s for you.” So reads the tagline of The Outline. When the company was first announced and these words first made public, knowing exactly what an online publication “for me” looks like was a big question mark. Especially given Topolsky’s emphasis on the building of custom technology for The Outline’s foundation, would we be looking at some sort of user-custom view? A selection of categories that create a custom “dashboard” of The Outline for each user? A dynamic header that would present the last read story to a returning visitor? Instead, The Outline is less about personalisation and more about ownership — not only for you, but distinctly yours.
The central metaphor of The Outline is deceptively simple. Introduced in Topolsky’s welcome post, the main organisational principle is the Stack: instead of stories represented in a list — complete with headline, byline, and date — as is convention across every online publication I can think of, The Outline represents stories as colourful cards complete with distinct typographical treatment of their headlines. On desktop, these cards sit fanned out like a poker hand, exploding horizontally when hovered over. On mobile, a Stack is neater — the top card obscuring those below, but cuing the user to flick through it with a cheeky peek of the cards below when pulled within view. The Stack is surprisingly powerful: instead of words boxed up and sandwiched atop each other in a reverse-chronological stream, each story feels manipulatable as if torn from a magazine and sorted through on a physical desk.
Furthermore, simply representing a story as a card imbues it with a identity. Every story is clearly of a piece with the publication as a whole but distinct. This objectifies each piece in the best sense of the world: something a user can “hold” and feel proud to “own”. The Stack is coupled with the design language of The Outline which largely bucks the trend of white-dominance — black text on white background — that is still surprisingly pervasive in online media despite its anachronism. (If you’re not printing to paper, why is every story in every other publication presented with the same black-on-white limitations?) Even a cursory “flip through” The Outline feels like being given a bunch of fun little toys to play with exactly how you like.
Beyond the sheer aesthetic feat of this radical approach to online publishing is the clear motivation for doing so. The slate of stories that went live this morning is largely made up of long reads, show pieces for The Outline. Normally pieces of this nature get slotted into my Instapaper to be read later. But immediately I felt The Outline wanted me back on their turf instead. Even after only about half an hour on the site, it’s already upset a typical consumption pattern of mine. For an online publication — given the current social-first mentality of most, bolstered by Facebook Instant Articles and Google Amp — to so compellingly drive their site as a legitimate destination is exactly what advertisers need. Method, Cadillac, and Under Armour — listed on The Outline homepage as “Our Proud Partners” — are brands of the kind I would actively run away from on sites like Wired or The Verge. Here — their ads also presented in “playable” Stacks — they’re welcome presences, presences I actively want to be around.
The ambition here is clear: to reinterpret principles of magazine publishing to an online destination. The amount of custom technology — ad treatments and the custom presentation of “Around The Web”-type links — to do so puts The Outline in a good position to test their convictions. However, it’s worth noting that other custom technologies — such as Vox’s original card stacks — have fallen away due to the impossibility of translation onto social. Both Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein of Vox have admitted getting it wrong as far as card stacks go, that the custom means of reintegrating news into an ever-evolving body of knowledge that underpinned Vox’s launch in 2014 didn’t account for the fact most people just read news stories through Facebook and Google. From how The Outline is being positioned, we can deduce that Topolsky isn’t interested in reaching the “everyone” that social enables, but rather just the right people. I just hope there are enough people who want to “own” an online publication to let The Outline stay as weird as it is.
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