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Web Writing in Journalism Classes
Exploring styles of writing on the Web is a valuable exercise for anyone studying newswriting, even if "online" isn't the form of publishing you have in mind. This page started out as a note for other teachers wondering what to do on the "online" day of a news writing survey course. Now I give the whole thing to the students, too. Clarity, Accuracy and Brevity are good things. To keep things clear and speed Web-browsing readers through their stories, online news writers often break longer stories into smaller chunks of text. The next edition of this page will follow that advice. For now, it's a homework reading assignment done as one easily printable page. The page has grown over the years and may have omissions or repetition, but I hope it is clear and accurate. If it isn't, please tell me: For quick feedback, use the green "comment" link at the bottom of this related weblog entry. (October, 2006)
Students entering 21st century professional journalism are already writing for news media that are printed, broadcast and delivered digitally -- to desktop computers, laptops, handhelds, iPods and mobile phones. Editors may have to work harder to fit their products onto those small screens, but in most other ways the Web is a bigger canvas for storytelling. Online, journalists can conquer time and space...
Answer: Not just one. Compare news sites' "home page" headlines and summaries with the leads and headlines in a print edition, or on the individual story Web pages. Even if a news organization doesn't have "Web only" writers, it may demonstrate a different writing style on its home page, section pages and special projects. Look at these: Compare TV news stories with the mostly-text versions on their websites. Sometimes both a text adaptation and a streaming-video copy of the broadcast will be on the site, making comparison easy. See http://cnn.com, http://wate.com and http://wbir.com for a start. Ironically, there may be more newspaper-style writing going on at many broadcast news organizations' Web sites than at their newspaper counterparts. Broadcasters can't just "shovel" their scripts online, so someone (usually called a "producer") has to play the old "rewrite desk" role to create readable stories, sometimes with extra reporting. At online sites built by newspapers, more of the energy goes into writing summaries, teases and new headlines to lead readers to the stories. For original news writing online, explore publications that were born on the Web, including "webzines" like http://slate.com and http://salon.com, or community news sites like http://newhavenindependent.com -- or the Tennessee weblogs at http://rockytopbrigade.org (more about them in a minute). Borrowing from broadcasting Like radio and television, the Web is "24/7," and Web writers for news websites often emphasize the "up to the minute" aspect of stories. Not only can they update stories, they can write using the present and present-perfect tenses to emphasize the "happening right now..." angle, just like broadcast news. On the other hand, online stories must stand up to reading hours or days after they are published, so time elements must be clear. In fact, online sites have put the "date" back in datelines... sometimes down to minute a story was published. Like broadcast news announcers "teasing" upcoming stories before a station break, Web producers need to invite the reader to stick around. Those summaries we mentioned can go on a home page, or on "section" pages like World News, Local News and Sports, or in the narrow columns called "rails" along the sides of other story pages. Writing in layers, chunks and "microcontent" Among other tasks, Web writers, editors and producers have to compensate for the difficulties of reading on a computer screen. A newspaper or magazine reader can take in a broadsheet page at a glance, skim the headline and a few paragraphs of each story, flip through pages or spread out a double-page graphic display of election results. Online, a writer's headlines and summaries aren't just introductory layers of news, they also become navigation tools leading readers to "inside pages" of the site. Writing effective headlines and summaries takes practice; so does expanding broadcast news scripts into stories that can be scanned quickly without the audio or video. Writing clearly and concisely is even more important online than it is in print. See "usability" researcher Jakob Nielsen's essays at useit.com. By testing different versions of stories, he has reached some of the same conclusions stressed in every news writing textbook: Readers are in a hurry; make it easy for them to find and absorb information. Follow the old "print journalism" advice; use the active voice, strong verbs, summary leads, inverted pyramid structure, tight writing and punchy headlines. (That's "punchy" in the sense of direct and hard-hitting -- not stumbling around like Rocky in the next-to-last round.) (As an exercise, search Nielsen's writing pages for "inverted pyramid," then for "promotional writing." His conclusions should interest public relations and advertising writers as well as news reporters: People appreciate facts and an attempt at objectivity, not "soft" adjectives, adverbs, platitudes and marketing puffery.) So what's "microcontent"? Most news sites also recognize the value of what Nielsen calls "microcontent" -- smaller units of information. He means headlines and summaries, but also things like captions, subheadings, "lift-out" quotes and bullet lists. What do you think? Is this bullet list easier to scan than the preceding sentence?
Are "layers of news" a new thing? Newspapers have told stories in layers for a century and more. Look at the way the Titanic's sinking was covered with pictures and multiple-deck headlines. Newspapers, as well as Web sites, generally confine themselves to one or two headline decks for most stories, possibly with a summary "blurb" before the story's lead paragraph. Another layering approach, in both print and online, is what a Poynter Institute article called "non-linear narrative." One of its examples was a Sun News feature about spring planting. The story was a natural for slicing into smaller pieces like the watermelon wedges at the top of this page. In the full-page newspaper layout, each vegetable or fruit had its own "wooden" box. Online, a designer might separate the boxes into individual pages linked to a pile of vegetables or a map of a garden -- with hypertext links leading to a separate page for each fruit or vegetable. The same short "chunks" of text probably would work on the Web page or in the newspaper layout without much rewriting. On more complex topics, breaking a story into parts can require advance planning by the writer and editor. How much background does each chunk need, especially if the reader doesn't follow a set sequence through the collection? (Hypertext novels have been written, taking advantage of that uncertainty to experiment with literary theories about storytelling and "closure." News writing should solve mysteries, not create them.) Using hypertext links, many news sites offer readers collections of background stories on recurring topics in the news. Sometimes called "shells," such pages assemble "evergreen" links to stories and other information. For examples, see the Times topics pages on people, places and issues, or the Washington Post politics page, which links to a database of congressional voting records. An online story may be presented in several forms -- one designed for reading on the screen, another for printing, another for downloading to a Palm organizer. Sometimes that will be a matter of reformatting a single text, but it also might mean writing separate versions. (The page you are reading, in contrast, is only presented as one long "chunk" so that you can print it for last-minute studying before the next exam. But you won't get the full message unless you return to it online to browse a few of the links.) Invitations to Click Headlines and summaries are especially important online because they serve a dual purpose. They provide information, but they also provide navigation: They invite the reader to "click through" to a full story or to investigate additional chunks of a multi-part story. Readers can't scan down the first column of an online story the way they do a newspaper front page. Headlines must work harder to tell people where they are going. Should the summary risk giving away too much? Or should it "tease" the reader to enter, and risk not telling enough? Professional site designers apparently have come to different conclusions. When most of a new site is "shovelware" from a print newspaper, the online editor should write fresh and functional headlines and story summaries for the "front page," not just shovel the headlines and leads into a home page template. Why? On a broadsheet newspaper page, the headlines, lead paragraphs and photos work as a team. Break up that team and readers may not be able to tell what a story is about. If the paper makes a habit of two-part headlines, but its website design allows only one line, the effect can be disastrous. For example, what information does this menu give you about the individual stories?
Sundown Rises Big crowd greets first concert in Knoxville's summer series For a more detailed discussion (and the long versions of those real headlines), see the second half of this article about http://KnoxNews.com. In the paper, each of those headlines had a second part that told more of the story. The KnoxNews headlines do seem to have gotten better since I first posted this page. However, they still slip up now and then. (Don't we all.) For more examples of summary and headline treatments, see the home pages and section front pages of a few more news organizations. Are the page one summaries the same as the story-page leads? Are the headlines the same ones that appear in the printed newspaper? Or something better?
Possible exercises:
Blogging & Citizen Journalism The frequently-updated Web sites called "blogs" use many writing styles and address many topics. Informality generally rules on personal weblogs. Others take a more journalistic tone. A few consciously try to fill the gaps in local professional news coverage. (For example, see http://h2otown.info and its publisher's video explanation.) Many blogs are what early blogger Dave Winer calls "the unedited voice of an individual," while others are group sites that may enforce some simple style rules for consistency's sake -- although I doubt that many bloggers keep an AP Stylebook next to their keyboards. Some, like Winer, filter the Web for their readers, leaning toward short summaries of headlines, links and a few comments. The most famous local example is UT law professor Glenn Reynolds' http://instapundit.com. Other blogs take the form of longer stories or essays and invite readers to join a dialogue in "comments" at the end of each original message. Here are two of my favorites: And some are mixtures of approaches:
Photos, multimedia & hypertext The Web is all about hypertext linkage. News sites can link to earlier stories, documents, background source materials and public discussions, to images, documents, databases and multimedia presentations. Some organizations may see choosing significant links as the writer's job; others may consider it part of the editing process -- especially if a story was originally written for broadcast or print, with a separate "online producer" responsible for adapting it to the Web. Today's fast Internet connections allow Web writing to take greater advantage of multimedia, from video blogs to YouTube. But there have been strong examples of multimedia storytelling for almost a decade. One of my favorites is the online version of a Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper series that led to the book and movie titled Black Hawk Down. The "writer's job" for author Mark Bowden included daily online conversations with readers. Their comments helped him check his facts and led him to more people to interview, adding more detail to the final story. The project may have been for a newspaper, but it had plenty of "multimedia": Bowden turned over his audio-taped interviews to the paper's Web producer, who added sound clips of voices at strategic points in the Web story, emphasizing the authenticity of Bowden's sources, increasing the "transparency" of the reporting process that went into his long-form dramatic storytelling. Photos, military video, maps and other graphics also added weight and authority. Along with choosing from an array of media, the editor or producer's job for an online news site may include writing the text menus, lists, summaries, word balloons, photo captions and narrations that go with multimedia presentations like Bowden's Somalia piece. For more recent examples, visit sites that draw on both newspaper and broadcast news professionals, such as combined or "convergence" news operations like Tampa Bay Online: http://multimedia.tbo.com Perhaps the simplest multimedia packages are slide shows, with captions, transitional texts, or even a spoken narration. "Writing to the visuals" may be the job of a staff writer, or a photographer may have to do it all, including the voice-over -- another convergence of news workers' roles. Many of those multimedia examples are thanks to the combination of fast Internet connections and a program called Macromedia Flash. The result is a new composite style of storytelling, blending writing with photography, visual design, animation, video and computer programming. Rather than rely on the browser's navigation tools, Flash programmers can build-in their own navigation, video players, moving graphics, scrolling text and transitions. The end product may be as interactive as a video game, filling all or part of the Web browser window. That smaller space for words is yet another reason for writers to practice the clear, concise, active and accurate writing that we teach in journalism classes. updated Oct. 28a, 2006
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