NicheWorks: The Chicago Tribune Website

The Chicago Tribune is one of the two big Chicago papers, and as such is a good example of an organized, commercially- oriented website. The site made its data available for exploration, and has been downloaded and explored using NicheWorks in the EDV environment. The goal of the analysis was to understand the structure of the site and see what desing criteria had been used in its production.

The MOMspider tool was used to create the set of links and categorize the nodes. The spider was set so that it would not follow links to other sites, and it automatically knows not to follow 'mailto' and cgi links. An awk script (yes, I know PERL is better, but..) was used to convert the HTML output from MOMspider into tables of node and link information.

Initial Look

Using the tree layout method in NicheWorks (described in detail in the paper NicheWorks: Visual Exploration of Very Large Graphs), the web site is laid out. Although there are a number of backlinks, the tree layout does a good job overall.

We have set both color and shape of the nodes to reflect the node type and status as returned from MOMspider. The coding is:

Orange squares: Local pages
Orange circles: Local images
Blue squares: Off-site pages
Yellow squares: CGI queries
Light-blue: Avoided

Links are colored on with brighter hues indicating more links from one URL to another. Some key URLs have been interactively labelled.

We can see a number of features immediately:

There are a set of key entry URLs, from which a large set of local non-image pages can be accessed (the inner circle). These pages in turn have links to a second set of pages. Only a few sections have a deeper structure - a lot of these are sprts-related.
You cannot go off-site from the top-level page. You can only do so after reading at least one other page. This is a common feature of commercial web pages.
The most heavily referred-to URLs are the Tribune banner: pix/th95.gif and an image indicating a team has won: pix/wonbut.gif.
Looks like the Tribune staffers have AOL accounts.

Advertising on the Trib pages

I bank with First Chicago, so I was curious when I noticed a link to www.fcnbd.com in the bottom left of the view. Looking at it in more detail showed that it was part of a CGI query which takes three parameters, an 'AdID', a 'spaceID' and a URL. This appears to be the method the Trib uses to sell advertising on its site.

To follow up on this, I created a list of titles and selected all the references to First Chicago Bank's web site from it. I then used a menu item to select all the links to those pages and then all the links to those pages. I then re-positioned the selected nodes and links to create the two components shown above. Also shown is the list of titles, sorted ans scaled so that only the local URLs are visible. The off-site URLs are all links to First Chicago, shown in yellow.

First Chicago advertises in sections we might expect from a bank: Homes, Real Estate, Transportation, Business, 'Your Money'. It also advertises quite heavily in the customized portions for the suburbs of Chicago: Lake, McHenry, DuPage, SouthWest, NorthWest. As well as this targeted marketing, it also has space in what is presumably the most expensize area; current news. For this edition of the paper, the Olympic Park bombing was the hot news of the day.

Searching for all the URLs with a CGI request including the 'AdID' keyword and selecting all the links to those pages resulted in the above image. For this view, we have kept the original positioning of the first overview, so that the two can be compared. The overall plan of making sure you read a level of Chicago Tribune content before being allowed to follow an outward link is clear.

Home	gwills@research.bell-labs.com