Friday, February 2, 2007

An editor's view of news writing for the Web Thumbing through my bookmark lists, I uncovered this list from an "Editing the Future" event a few years ago.  Janice Castro of the Medill School of Journalism outlined these "10 Steps to More Effective Online Writing": Begin with your main point. Make a concise, clear statement. Write very tight, using perhaps half the usual words per paragraph... Break the text into chunks of 100 to 150 words. Give one idea per paragraph. Make your microcontent - headlines, captions - work. Write in hypertext, include useful links. A sidebar becomes a set of interactive bullets. Provide searchable data and original documents, full interviews. Give context and opportunities for exploration. Keep it simple. Use crisp organization and a highly readable font. Use color as navigational design. No reverse type, please. Write for scannability. Highlight key terms and use bullets. Invite action. Offer other material to look at, responses you are prepared to answer. Reward every click. Finally, be yourself. Whoever wrote that summary of Castro's presentation shifted into the third person to explain that last item: Castro rejected the advice of "so-called experts" who claim that online communication has to be done with attitude. "No," she said. "It has to be high quality. It has to be you. ... Voice, accuracy, reliability and trust matter more than ever." Even though there are 11 items in that top-10 list, it's still a much tighter summary than my rambling essay on writing for the Web, which I've been adding to off and on for years. I'll invite my online journalism students to review both approaches and comment in their own weblogs, and I'll point the list out to my newswriting students to show how many things we focus on are as (or more) important online as they are in print. 6:25:08 PM     Wikipedia Takes Notice of Knox County Commission Controversy The News Sentinel and contributors at KnoxViews aren't the only ones taking note of the Knox County commission's term limits controversy: This week's commission meeting quickly made it to Wikipedia, as KnoxViews blogger RocketSquirrel notes, along with suggesting a group blog "who's who" for the county... 6 Degrees of Knoxville and Knox County: Help Document the Family Tree. See Wikipedia, Knox County TN and scroll to Law and Government, where part of the entry apparently was posted, deleted and posted again within a couple of days. Wikipedia is like that... If people don't get bored with it, watch the Wikipedia "history" and "discussion" tabs for the sequence and any explanations of deletions or additions. Note: One edit explanation shorthand note is "POV," Wikipedia lingo for a post with a non-objective point of view, which Wikipedians are supposed to avoid. (If I didn't keep forgetting my Wikipedia login and password, I'd be tempted to do more editing there... but then I'd never get anything else done. I'm also not sure what the rules are about footnoting things, since a "ref" tag now puts reference links at the end of the story. An earlier Wikipedia tag made it possible to turn part of a sentence into a link. Even though I try to avoid anonymous edits, I tried the old linking technique on that page to see if it still works. It does.) The all-time best analysis of the "culture" of communal editing at Wikipedia is Jon Udell's "screencast," of the Wikipedia Heavy Metal Umlaut page, which includes a time-lapse video of the page changing over a period of years. (Here's how he made the movie.) Meanwhile, the Knoxville "six degrees of separation" blog idea reminded me of a similar project, with a high-tech approach, pursued by a Virginia newspaper a couple of years ago to learn "Who Runs Richmond?" Reporters built a database of the names and jobs of boards and commission members and people at some private companies -- more than 60 groups in all. They interviewed more than 50 individuals, some of them speaking off the record. The database grew to  1,116 entries, and its cross-linkages were charted with social-networking software to create an interactive graphic of the city's "relationships between powerful people and civic organizations." 12:57:03 PM

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