NBC News will be relaunching its NBCNews.com site sometime during the evening of Feb. 4, with a new design, expanded original video, and features that the news organization believes will greatly improve the way they can explain and cover the news.
“We throw away more content just on our broadcast than a lot of organizations create,” explained Brian Williams, anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, in a briefing with reporters.
Williams added that the relaunched site would help them much better use their news resources. It will be “much better for us, the producers of all this news and information, and much better for customers and readers and viewers,” offering an experience that is much more “instantaneous” in its coverage of the news and much “broader” in the array of content it offers.
Like a number of other recently relaunched sites in the TV industry, NBCNews.com is much more mobile centric, with a layout that is easier to use on mobile devices, which now account for a growing share of traffic.
The move is part of an ongoing effort by NBC News to rethink its operations.
In 2012, NBC and Microsoft ended a longstanding joint venture for the digital operations and in the last year and a half, NBC News has been revamping its web, mobile and app strategies by creating separate sites for content that had been hosted on MSN.com.
The relaunched NBCNews.com site is a major step in efforts, which are designed to better TV and digital operations, said Gregory Gittrich, executive editor of NBCNews.com in a briefing with reporters.
“This is much more than a redesign,” said Gittrich. “This is a full relaunch,” with new publishing tool designs and user experience. “What we are really doing is changing the way we tell stories.”
One example is a new animated feature called “Show Me” that explains complex subjects and data in an “interesting and fun way,” he says.
They also have a new series called “Debunker” that analyzes and deconstructs conventional wisdom.
NBC News has also been beefing up its digital reporting team to produce more original content and has been working to reorganize its operations to “take advantage of that original reporting and marry it with TV,” Gittrich said.
“This site is the first stage of a fairly significant transformation….and rethinking of our storytelling process and workflow,” added Julian March, senior VP of editorial and innovation at NBC News, who recently joined the division.
