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Steve Herrmann

A new look


It’s been a time of even more hectic activity than usual here on the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News website over the past week or two. Our development and design teams have been putting the finishing touches behind the scenes to a new look for the site which - all being well - we're aiming to launch next week.

For the journalists it's been a period of familiarisation with the changes, and briefings on how it will affect the way they create pages in our content production system.

I'll go into more detail about the changes once you’re able to see them for yourselves, but the new look will include wider pages, bigger images, a new programmes area on the front page and a new pan-ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ masthead.

Overall the idea is to make the whole site even easier to use, creating more room for the content to be easily seen and scanned.

Along with this, as I mentioned previously, we’ve been gradually rolling out a new system for showing video and audio – embedding it within our story pages () so it’s quicker and simpler to access. It’s confined to just some stories for now, and we’ve been assessing how it’s doing.

Early signs suggest that on those stories where we’ve embedded the video in a story, as opposed to providing the link to a pop-up player as we've done up to now, the video gets about ten times more usage than before. So it looks like it’s working well so far… More soon on the rest of the changes.

Steve Herrmann is editor of the

Peter Barron

Going Carla crazy


Newsnight logoA couple of weeks ago I was talking to a French diplomat about the forthcoming Presidential visit to Britain about what the key issues might be. I struggled to think where points of controversy might arise and concluded that the big story could actually be Carla Bruni. The diplomat shot me a look of Gallic disdain.

Why has the media gone quite so mad about the new Mrs Sarkozy? The more than even their , and today the high-minded did a six page front cover feature. Are they satisfying a genuine public fascination or does this represent a new low in the media's obsession with supermodels, celebrity and gossip?

Carla BruniIn the Newsnight office Carla Bruni has, I admit, been the most talked about subject of the week, although so far our coverage has been limited to Jeremy's more-detailed-than-usual scrutiny of the front pages (which you can watch here).

In this morning's meeting we had a long discussion about an appropriate Newsnight response, and concluded that we should discuss the Carla Bruni phenomenon and the media's handling of it on . Let us know what you think.

Peter Barron is editor of Newsnight

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