Update: N. Ram, Editor of The Hindu, tells Exchange4Media that though the publication plans to break news on the website first, before it goes to print, there will be significant exceptions. The problem? "unfortunately in India, there are regular cases of infringement – lifting exclusive stories, and not so much as giving credit to you as the source," says Ram. More here. Original Story (Aug 17, 2009): The Hindu, the Indian daily published by Kasturi & Sons, has launched the beta version of its redesigned website. The redesigned version went live on August 15th 2009. Breaking news and updates have moved to the redesigned website, and currently both the new and the old website (www.hindu.com) have content from the feature sections. The Hindu intends to migrate its legacy content to the new design in a few months. The site looks clean, and the 'Breaking News' section of the site highlights how recent the news published is, though ideally, breaking news should be in the first scroll. The text on the page could be darker, and in my opinion, the "Opinion" segment is too far down the index page as well. News is a commodity, and opinion acts as a key differentiator for publications. The text based content has been pushed down to make space for images, which may attract more attention. The older version of the Hindu's website Old New Features The new features, though a significant upgrade compared to the previous Hindu design, are frankly quite common among news publication websites worldwide.…
