Patrick Beeson

I arrived home yesterday evening to find my Wii glowing blue -- an update!

Of course having my fingers on the pulse of the online news industry I knew exactly what it was: the Wii News Channel, courtesy the Associated Press. It's fast; it's flashy; it's not without its flaws (I'll get to this later); and newspapers should definitely take notice.

Why? It's the user interface stupid.

The Wii remote controller provides a near seamless method of interacting with menus and other objects onscreen. The News Channel takes this and runs along side the Forecast Channel with its presentation and use of the globe (spin it and watch in amazement). By looking at the news in a world-wide view, stories stack up on the country with the "most" (most as determined by the AP) news; the U.S. obviously having the most because we're the most important (right).

If you're a more passive story browser, the "Slideshow" feature might be of interest. It goes through the list of the most current stories in a given category (identical to a newspapers' sections) while showing where the story happened on the map and whether there is a photo to accompany the text.

Entering the story is a constant for any method of browsing: click the headline. Text resizing is easy with the plus or minus buttons on the controller -- the text reassembles itself on screen, a very cool effect -- and photos are blown up to full screen when clicked.

As I said before, it's all very fluid and easy to navigate and doesn't require much in the way of instruction to understand what's happening. Essentially, it's news meets video games. And this is where newspapers should pay attention.

By leveraging the Wii's intuitive interface, the news can be presented without confusing navigation or users wondering where they should go to find the most current information. Most newspaper Web sites don't do this; in fact it seems like they're moving in the opposite direction.

Newspapers should stop trying to force the print model on their Web users. Instead, they should realize the most intuitive aspects of the Web -- I'm thinking design, navigation and user interaction here -- and rework the way in which content is presented.

Despite all that the Wii News Channel is, there is much that it isn't. Because it's an RSS feed at its most basic, albeit with an impressive overlay of graphics, it should provide users the ability to add other feeds to the mix (it doesn't). It should also include some of AP's excellent multimedia (it doesn't), or perhaps the cool-but-dying ASAP (it doesn't). And where is the breaking news feature?

The most glaring oversight with the Wii News Channel is the lack of integration with the Mii Channel. Imagine being able to share information with other Wii owners through their Miis (think social networking here), at at least post comments about a given story.

I hope Nintendo plans to add these features for a future update. But for now, the Wii News Channel is yet another piece of the media longtail that newspapers should be watching.