Introducing the all-new SCMP.com

Beta released for preview

Published: 10:00am, 21 Nov 2018

Our goal as an organisation is to lead the global conversation on China. To achieve this, we’re committed to delivering you comprehensive news coverage, valuable insight, and opinion delivered using an intuitive and immersive reading experience.

We’ve listened to your feedback and it’s clear you want to be able to find stories that interest you more easily, you want to discover more opinions and insight, and you want to deep dive on the topics that matter to you most. You’ve spoken, and we’ve listened.

Over the past year we’ve been working on a complete overhaul of SCMP.com with the goal of improving our platform for your needs. We’ve prototyped a number of different experiences, features, and discovery mechanics and we’re now ready to share these with a wider audience. In the beginning these changes will only affect our website, scmp.com, but in the months to come we’ll also be rolling out similar changes to our native app. The site is currently under beta release and you can preview the site here.

We know it can take time to adjust to change, and we’re keen to hear your thoughts on the new platform. So if you love or hate some of the new features or have features you like to suggest, we’d love to hear from you. Send us your feedback.

What's new?

Content Recommendations
With more and more content being published, we want to help users discover content that interests you. To help with this, we have introduced new Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered content recommendations. Found on the homepage, section pages, and article pages, these recommendations take into account your reading behaviour and geolocation to help recommend content that might interest you.. The platform also helps to surface older evergreen content that may be relevant to you.

Although AI-powered recommendations are an important new feature of the site, we continue to place the highest importance on our Editorial teams’ news judgment. The newsroom continues to prioritise our top stories and ensure the editorial integrity of each and every piece SCMP publishes. The use of AI to enhance the user experience is only possible because of the humans behind it and the input they provide.

Artificial Intelligence powered recommendations helping you find content that matters to you most

New Editions
We’re adding two new editions to SCMP.com -- a US edition and an Asia edition -- in addition to the existing HK edition and International edition. These will help curate content on homepage that is most relevant to audiences in these locations.

You can always switch editions at any point using the menu (at the top of the page on desktop and in the “hamburger” - three horizontal lines - menu on mobile).

Enhanced Search
In order to help you find specific articles, we’ve completely overhauled our internal search to help deliver more relevant search results.

Navigation
Many readers told us that our navigation was a little overwhelming so we’ve simplified this by grouping all news sections together under a single ‘News’ category. Here you can find all of the sections you’re used to in one handy location. We’ve also added a new category called ‘More+’ which contains links to video, photo, and infographics (coming soon), as well as a number of new sections.

We’ve also changed the way you can navigate through the site. If you’re on a mobile article page and you swipe right/left, you can browse content we think you might find interesting. Or, if you scroll down, you’ll see more articles directly related to the article above -- allowing you to deep dive on your favourite topics.

Introducing 'The Rail'; a new way to navigate through SCMP.com on your mobile.

Speed
A big issue you raised with us is the speed of our website, and we agree! To make the site load faster, we’ve made significant changes. We’ll be putting more resources into this over the coming weeks and months to ensure the site loads as quickly as possible.

Expanded content
To respond to reader preferences, we’ve added some new channels throughout the site. These include a new Economy channel where you can find the latest China and Global economy stories. We’ve also expanded our Asia coverage to include more frequent updates from our award-winning This Week In Asia section.

Over the past few months, readers have responded extremely positively to our explainer content. With this in mind, we’ve aggregated these to make them easy to find with the introduction of our new Explained section.

SCMP Films will deep dives into the issues and characters that make Asia an extraordinary place

From a video perspective, we’re excited to launch SCMP Films: a new initiative to bring you web-length deep dives into the issues and characters that make Asia such an extraordinary place. From the skyscraper canyons of Hong Kong to the mountains of Qinghai, from the deserts of Gansu to the Korean demilitarised zone, we'll introduce you to passionate people who are living extraordinary lives. This will launch in the coming weeks.

You may have also noticed we have started to produce a variety of podcasts covering subjects like China, Asian Food, and much much more. You can check out all of our series in our new Podcast section.

Finally, some of our readers told us that they’d love to be able to find the best SCMP content in a single place so we’re introducing SCMP Spotlight. Here you’ll be able to find award-winning stories, amazing infographics, exclusive interviews, and new video documentaries.

New immersive storytelling
As part of the all new SCMP.com, we’ll be introducing a number of new storytelling approaches. From Opposing Opinions to Audio long reads to Photo Essays to Bios, these templates will help tell stories in more compelling and user-friendly ways.

There’s more still to come

Although this initial launch includes lots of new features, there’s still more to come. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be introducing more new functionality on the site as well as enhancing our native app to align it with many of the changes you can see on our website.

You can preview the all-new SCMP.com here.

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