You may have noticed that things look a little different around here. We’ve just launched the third major redesign in Nieman Lab history. Hope you like it!
My No. 1 goal for this design (internal codename: Roscoe ) was increasing design diversity on article pages — to enable a greater degree of art direction. In our previous design, we’ve had three basic layout choices for an article — which basically came down to how large we wanted to play its art. Now we have vastly more room to tie the design to the article — multiple layouts, multiple arrangements of headlines/decks/art, multiple background colors, multiple optical sizes, and more. Here’s a sampling:
The new homepage gives more prominence to our What We’re Reading section — which we update 10 to 20 times each weekday, meaning there’ll be something fresh atop the homepage frequently through the day. It’s got modules to highlight two of our most important topics — AI and local news — and a place for older stories still worth highlighting. Search and subscribe have improved UX. Our footer now aligns with the other Nieman Foundation websites. (Plus: dark mode !)
For about a decade, we’ve divided our stories into “hubs”: Business Models, Mobile & Apps, Audience & Social, Aggregation & Discovery, and Reporting & Production. Those had started to feel a little outmoded; it’s been a while since “mobile” was anything other than the middle of the mainstream, for instance. So we’ve replaced them with six “beats” more attuned to the times: AI & Journalism , Search & Platforms , Audience & Creators , Local News , Reporting & Production , and Business & Revenue . With a little AI assistance, we’ve populated those collections with all 12,000-plus articles we’ve published since 2008.
Those 12,000-plus articles were one of the biggest challenges — making sure they all made the transition cleanly. More than 100 of those articles used custom CSS; each one had to be checked (and most of them updated) to match new layout structures and typefaces. In all, there are more than 100,000 unique URLs on niemanlab.org that now have a new look. And we now have enough history to finish off the homepage with stories we’ve published on this day over the decades.
Our new primary typefaces are TypeTogether’s Literata as the serif and Bakken & Bæck’s Schibsted Grotesk as the sans. (Schibsted Grotesk is, of course, the custom typeface designed for the European media house .) My thanks to the Freight collection (Text, Display, and Sans) for its decade-plus of typographic service.
I’ve designed and coded every iteration of niemanlab.org since founding the Lab in 2008, and it’s been a point of perverse pride for me to be a journalist with some technical ability. But it also means that, over the past 18 years, our backend has accumulated the handcoded cruft of a zillion PHP bugfixes and CSS hacks. So this time I was happy to do the vast majority of the work in Claude Code, which made some of the more ambitious ideas I had far easier to implement. The code is clean and organized in a way that should make it easier to build further.