Archive for February, 2008
In part three of this five-part series, I look at the need for scannability in writing for the web. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism - comments very much invited.
Users of news websites are generally task-oriented: they will most likely have arrived at your webpage through a search for something specific. If they don’t find that something specific fast, they will go elsewhere.
How do they find that something? Seventy-nine percent of Web users scan pages. They look for headlines, subheadings, links, and anything else that helps them navigate the text on screen.
Of course, the tendency is not limited to the web. Over hundreds of years print newspapers and magazines have developed a number of techniques to help ‘browsers’ - the headline, the sidebar, the photo, the caption, the subhead, and the inverted pyramid; broadcast news also has its techniques: the intro, the establishing shot, the actualite.
Online news borrows from both, but because it is a medium where users are active readers, scannability is key to effective online journalism. There are a number of techniques that enhance the scannability of any webpage:
- Clear, unambiguous headlines: a reader scanning down a list of search results is not always going to be willing to decode cryptic or punny headlines. They just want to know what the article is about. Also, an online audience is an international audience. They may not understand a culturally-specific pun or clever wordplay, so keep your online headlines clear, functional and unambiguous. More to the point, if you use a key word or phrase in your headline - such as the name of the subject of the story - it will improve your search engine rankings for that word or phrase. For example, the New York Times print article ‘For the Young, Politics Is Social’ was reheadlined ‘Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On‘ because people are more likely to search for ‘finding political news online’.
- Intro-as-summary: sound the death knell for the delayed drop. Having your first par sum up what the story is about is useful for many reasons: it is likely to be displayed alongside a link to the story in search results; readers using screen readers will know quickly if the story is relevant to them; and readers using RSS readers will be able to see at a glance whether the story is worth reading. Also, search engines attach more importance to the first paragraphs of a webpage, so including key words there will improve your search engine ranking.
- Subheadings: breaking an article every few paragraphs with subheadings that indicate the content to come gives the reader numerous entry points into the text. Again, make them as clear as possible.
- Bullet or number lists: see how this bullet list caught your eye as soon as you looked at the page? These work brilliantly online - any chance you get, use them.
- Indented quotes: users often look for direct quotes. Help them by indenting any quote that runs over one line (blogs do this very well).
- Hyperlinks: the conventional blue, underlined text screams ‘click me’ and, in blog convention, shows you are supporting your argument. You may be concerned that linking means people will leave your site. Well of course they will: it’s the web, stupid. But because you gave them that lovely, useful link, they will come back time and time again. Until you stop linking.
- Emboldened or highlighted words: this is a good way of highlighting key phrases or words in your piece and again gives the user entry points into the text. Use it sparingly or it loses its impact (note: some websites render links as highlights, in which case avoid. And never underline text for emphasis - it will look like a link and frustrate the user).
Accessibility and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
There is a further benefit to making your online journalism scannable: accessibility.
People with limited vision or blindness who use screen reading software will generally browse a webpage by setting it to read out headings and links first (in HTML there are six levels of headings, from h1 to h6. These indicate the level of importance of the heading, with h1 being most important). Adding clear headlines and subheadings means they won’t have to listen to 300 words before they hit the part they want.
If you’re a hard-nosed business type who couldn’t care less about users with screen readers, consider this: the biggest blind users of the web are search engines.
Search engines, quite logically, place higher importance on headings, subheadings, links, and bold text. It helps them index your content, so the more effectively you use these the higher you are likely to be listed, and the more visitors you will have. They also place a lot of importance on your page title (that bit across the blue bar at the top of your browser), which is usually generated from your article headline, so the headline is actually doubly important (if it only says the name of the publication, kick someone).
If you really want to make your headlines optimised for search engines you might also want to consider using something like Google’s Keyword Tool, which will suggest the most popular searches based on the word or phrase you type in (by the way, try a search for your own newspaper and scroll down to ‘Additional keywords to be considered’ to find out what other things your readers are searching for).
The first two words are crucial
Jakob Nielsen has done a lot of work looking at how website users read webpages. In particular, he has found that users read in an F-shaped pattern - the implications of which it’s worth quoting in full:
“Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare [...] Yes, some people will read more, but most won’t.
“The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
“Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.”
Because of the last point, Nielsen also writes that passive writing works better in headlines online, because it allows you to “front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness”.
This runs counter to basic training in headline writing, and so it’s worth adding some qualifications.
Firstly, it’s safe to say the classic ‘Man Bites Dog’ is still better than ‘Dog bitten by man’ online, because it’s short, and a scanning reader will still ‘get it’. But anything longer bears careful consideration. Nielsen’s own example is that:
“Yahoo Finance follows all 13 design guidelines for tab controls, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.”
changes to:
“13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.”
To take a more specifically news-based example:
‘Tesco backs ban on cheap alcohol‘
will work better as
‘Cheap alcohol ban backed by Tesco‘.
Essentially the question becomes “Which opening two or three words will be most attractive and useful to scanning readers?”
In this case ‘Cheap alcohol ban’ is more useful and relevant than ‘Tesco backs ban’.
By the same logic, ‘Man bites…’ is more useful than ‘Dog bitten…’, which is why ‘Man Bites Dog’ still wins out.
And the principle extends to standfirsts, first pars and subheadings too.
Nielsen also says:
“Given that users often read only a couple of words from each text element, you should reduce duplication of salient keywords.
“Don’t use the same initial keywords in your headline and summary. You have 4 words to make your point, so use 4 different words.
“Avoid repeating any headline words in the summary, except for the most important one or two keywords. You can repeat these halfway through the summary to reinforce them for people who scanned past them in the headline.”
One final note: if that use of the numeral “4″ annoyed you as it did me (old editing instincts die hard), Nielsen also writes that numbers work best as numerals online:
“numerals often stop the wandering eye and attract fixations, even when they’re embedded within a mass of words that users otherwise ignore.”
Why? Because numbers represent facts, he argues. And users’ eyes locate numerals more easily
“The shape of a group of digits is sufficiently different from that of a group of letters to stand out to users’ peripheral vision before their foveal vision fixates on them. 2415 looks different than four, even though both consist of 4 characters.”
“Digits enhance the scannability of Web content. It’s that simple.”
Linking effectively
Links are the lifeblood of the web - and one of the first things people look for when they visit a page: not because they want to leave your site (yet), but because they want to see what value your webpage offers in terms of resources and guidance.
What they don’t want to see as they scan down the page is this:
Click here
It doesn’t matter what sits either side of those two words - “Click here to read..” or “…to find out more click here” - because that’s not what users will immediately see.
A link should make sense on its own. It should be succinct, and unambiguous. Overheid.nl’s guidelines on ‘Writing good link text‘ gives the bad example:
“The SP refers to statements which the mayor made in March.”
Is this linking to the SP? The referral? Or the statements? They instead suggest:
For the same reason you should deep link wherever possible - that is, link to a specific page within a site, not its homepage. Homepages are updated frequently, so the headline story you link to today will be gone tomorrow. For example:
“The BBC reports today on rising gas profits” (link to http://news.bbc.co.uk/)
is bad.
“The BBC reports today on rising gas profits” (link to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7256096.stm)
is good (and more succinct, too).
Finally, if you are linking to anything other than a webpage - e.g. PDFs, images, Word documents, spreadsheets - it should be made clear, e.g. “In the report (PDF)“.
This will avoid frustrating users who would otherwise wonder why their browser is booting up Word/crashing/displaying an error message: remember that the user may not have the software to open that document - particularly as more people use mobile phones to browse the web.
You might also add information about file size and download times. More information on this at Overheid.nl’s Web guidelines on ‘Links to downloadable files‘.
Low-literacy users
Having said all this about scannability, I want to add a final exception: if your site is aimed at low-literacy users you should not accept all of the above as gospel. In fact, given that Nielsen estimates that 40% of web users will be low-literacy by 2010, you should definitely read his post on how low-literacy users read anyway.
February 25th, 2008
I’ve already published the first draft of this article, and Journalism.co.uk published the final edited version. Just for the sake of completeness, here’s the second draft before it was edited down for publication, which is around 200 words longer.
The last twelve months have seen enormous change in regional newspapers. Video, podcasts and blogging are de rigeur; YouTube and Facebook are not just sites to fiddle on during your tea break; and the segregations of print and online - and of writer and reader - are being broken down.
But with internet startups invading their markets, with lower costs and a native understanding of new media - are local newspapers moving fast enough?
Video and audio
The most visible transformation in local newspapers has been the inexorable rise of video. The looming threat of broadcasters moving into ultra-local news services online, twinned with the success of YouTube, has transformed print publishers into aspiring broadcasters.
The early results were, as many in the industry admit, often embarrassing. Rushed editing and shifty presentation saw seasoned hacks fighting background noise to read out the day’s headlines, or the most attractive young reporter banished to the roof to read out weather forecasts.
Results have improved noticeably since (it would have been hard for them to get any worse). And employers are investing in highly visible studio facilities and kit - but for many there is too much focus on technical skills rather than effective storytelling and interviewing techniques, while the possibilities of the medium when placed online have gone largely unexplored: this is shovelware TV, not Rocketboom.
Meanwhile podcasts - the buzzword of 2005 - are dying a slow death. Northcliffe’s initial enthusiasm for the form has tailed off particularly visibly, with the ‘This Is’ network showing only four still being produced and dozens not updated in months. Across newspapers online audio is now more likely to take the shape of raw recordings from interviews, and there are few signs of a local Islamophonic or Many Questions.
Integration
For many journalists the biggest change has been that of the structure of the newsroom itself. “Everything has changed,” says the Lancashire Evening Post’s Mike Hill. “Everybody in the room works on all platforms, from reporters, photographers through to sub editors, everybody. There is no hierarchy in terms of platform.” Trinity Mirror are pursuing a similar strategy, with its Welsh titles leading the way.
But at most newspapers there is still some separation which, combined with the gap between the digital natives (some journalists) and the digital immigrants (most editors) is leading to a real neglect of the possibilities of new media.
Andy Dickinson, who trains journalists in producing video for the web, agrees: “It is still not part of the process. It’s an extra that can be dropped in to the paper. And digital newsgathering skills fall into that same trap. An individual may have worked out how to make a map or find a bit of YouTube video that might make for a nice feature - car crime, dog poo or holes in the road - but these tools aren’t integrated into the mindset of the newsroom and the newsgathering process.
“I think part of the reason for that is that the success of the stories that use these tools and techniques is not felt or measured in the paper. It tends to result in more hits etc. - an impact on the website, which is still seen by many as the necessary evil in the newsroom.”
Newsgathering
Computer assisted reporting has yet to truly hit journalistic culture. For most journalists the internet still represents an extension of the library and news wires - a place to browse for information on a story, or track down sources - and then leave.
But that was web 1.0, circa 1997. The real opportunity of web 2.0 - the web as a platform - is begging to be explored. While local journalism is supposed to be all about community, local journalists’ relationships with communities online are for the most part non-existent, or one-way. Online, it’s fair to say that you get what you give out. By contributing to the blogosphere, to Flickr and YouTube and Facebook, journalists will generate contacts, leads, contributors and readers.
Similarly, newspaper websites that don’t ghettoise readers into forums, that don’t publish blogs that are simply rebranded columns, but that genuinely invite readers to contribute to the newsgathering and verification process, will reap the benefits. Some notable experiments with Flickr, mapping and crowdsourcing have demonstrated that when you show you value your readers, they return the compliment.
Looking forward
The sense across the news industry is of big ideas at the top, overworked and underpaid journalists at the bottom, and comparatively web-illiterate editors in the middle catching the flak from both sides and trying to maintain still-profitable print operations amidst all the fuss about the web. If the news industry was a person, it would be a man with lots of ideas trying to walk with cramp in both legs and a stomach that’s struggling to figure out what it’s just eaten.
The big ideas have huge promise. For Archant it’s geotagging and databases. For Trinity Mirror, trialling mobile reporting with Vodafone and rolling out the Teesside Gazette’s experiments with hyperlocal, postcode-based news to other newspapers in the group. For Johnston Press the Lancashire Evening Post is looking at web-led in-depth surveys on the region’s big debates, generating (print) editorial supplements.
But, Archant aside, these are isolated experiments in the leading outposts of large publishing groups, where the savviest editors work, and the best-trained journalists. Understandably wary of ploughing money into any experiment that may prove to be a costly flop, and with a workforce largely raised in a pre-internet, print-only culture, the publishers are taking their time. Trinity Mirror’s hyperlocal experiment, for example, may be a year old by the time the next one gets under way. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of journalists who need re-educating and training in everything from video and podcasting to social networking, managing databases, and online etiquette.
And they all have newspapers to get out.
Because “Web-first” is still a strategy in publishing only - not in journalism and storytelling. For most journalists - and even more editors - the web is still a ‘channel’, not a place. It’s somewhere to put stuff - that’s why video took off so quickly: it was something everyone could understand. They’d seen it on the telly.
What needs to be made clear is that the internet makes news a service, not a product; that every action of a journalist online - commenting, blogging, networking, twittering, posting to YouTube - is an act of distribution, and because they’re not doing those things, great stories aren’t being read as much as they should, or told as well as they could.
Google’s Super Tuesday election mashups with Twitter and YouTube should serve as a massive wake-up call to the news industry. They demonstrated that major online players and nimble-footed startups were experimenting with editorial coverage, and that they could do it in an innovative, exciting way that engaged a young audience.
And that that young audience were going to YouTube for their news not because it is video shovelware, but about community, personality, utility, viral distribution - and most of all, about fun.
Now that’s a real challenge for publishers.
February 23rd, 2008
Remember when newspaper editors thought it was impressive to have a virtual version of their newspaper, turning pages and all? Remember how no one read them?
Well it seems the same mistakes are being made all over again by Arabic daily newspaper An-Nahar.
The newspaper now features a Flash version of itself - complete with a virtual desk littered with virtual pencil, magnifying glass and, er, CD.
It has to be one of the most elaborate, confusing and pointless pieces of newspaper design I’ve ever seen.
You can imagine the conversation:
“Click on the pencil and you can move it over the paper, see? And you can ‘highlight’ stuff. Well, yes, actually when you try to highlight stuff you get an uncontrollable red scrawl not unlike that of a deranged two-year-old… but it’s just like real life!
“And the coffee cup tips over when you click it! Oh we laughed and laughed when we spent all afternoon getting that to work. In fact, we loved it so much we spent twice as long on the mobile phone that changes wallpaper.”
And the magnifying glass? If you designed a newspaper so badly that everyone needed a magnifying glass, would you be proud?
Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen is widely known for his opinions on the weaknesses of Flash (he’s also written on the problem of using physical metaphors for navigation).
Flash tempts people to reinvent graphical user interfaces, confusing users (check.) It is expensive to create and maintain, and sucks up valuable resources that can be better spent on core services (check.) It presents problems for internationalising and localising content (well, I can’t read the content, so I’m guessing here).
What else? Oh yes, you can’t email it to a friend, or bookmark it, or even copy and paste from it. And it’s not searchable, which also means it presents accessibility issues, and that search engines are less likely to rank it highly.
In short, it’s a dud.
Amazingly, however, the original newspaper website does have podcasts, widgets, photo galleries, mobile services and RSS feeds. With that sort of web literacy, why on earth did they feel the need to go all virtual?
Thanks to Tuuli Platner for the lead.
February 23rd, 2008
This post marks the start of what I hope will become a regular feature for the Online Journalism Blog. Every Friday afternoon I will (try to) post a link to an online tool which has potential journalistic applications.
The thing is, I’m not assuming I’ll be the one to spot them.
I’ll write what I can see, what I think and what I’ve done - but for the most part, it’s over to you: if you find the tool intriguing or it solves some problem you have, I’d like you to share your thoughts.
Hence: ‘Something for the weekend’ - something to play around with on a slow Friday afternoon or Sunday night clickfest.
I’ve decided to start with a tool that I find fascinating, and ticks a lot of boxes for me, but whose application I can’t quite yet see. It’s a solution in search of a problem:
(similar services available).
The Tag Cloud Generator will generate a tag cloud for any webpage based on links or just most-used words. The tags will link to Wikipedia or Delicious based on your choice. You can customise appearance and delete irrelevant tags.
Now I’m a big fan of tags - and I recommend anyone to read Everything is Miscellaneous to find out why. They allow you to see patterns and relationships that otherwise might not be apparent.
So. The first application I thought of for this - and actually the reason why I searched for it - was this:
I was writing an album review for a music magazine, and the particular artist has a set of cliches around him. I wanted to be able to put a bunch of reviews through a tag cloud generator to see the most frequent words.
I did it with one review and it kinda worked. To do it with more than one would have been a cut, paste, and upload job that I didn’t have time for - but really that’s what you need to do.
I then tried doing it with the Wikipedia entry for the Gulf War. Dates figure heavily. Places, people and things (e.g. submarines) too.
But that’s just two applications. I’m hoping you can come up with more ideas.
February 22nd, 2008
It’s been a pretty good first week of blogging from my online journalism students. After those impressive first ideas they’ve demonstrated that they understand the form in practice as well as theory.
First-time bloggers are often disappointed that the world isn’t listening as soon as they open their mouth, and I was expecting to have to advise all students that it would take time to build any sort of audience.
But when I asked them to call up their stats after just seven days I was surprised to find some were already gathering a readership: two students had had over 130 visits; another had had around 60; and a further two had around 40.
Remember, this was in just one week - their first week. And most had barely written two posts.
How had they managed this? Clearly their activities online played a part, including setting up Facebook groups, linking to other blogs, and using tags.
And since then the blogs have improved further.
Top of the class has to be Tuuli Platner’s blog on environmental news in North and South America, which includes some intelligent treatments and web-savvy research. Bloggers Influencing the Green Vote is a great example which brought a response from one of the bloggers she linked to.
Also impressive is Kasper Sorensen’s blog on water pollution stories in Europe. His serialised tactic of an ABC of Water Pollution is a clever idea.
Closer to (my) home, Alice Fanning has set herself The Great Plastic Bag Challenge on her blog about grassroots activity Ecocommunity.
And Stephanie Grant’s onerous challenge to cover environmental issues in Africa is covered at Enviroafrica, a mix of personal reflection on the journalistic process, and traditional spokesperson-led articles. She’s taken perhaps the most difficult ‘beat’ of all with gusto, and has paid attention to design - although she needs to brush up on copyright law for her images (that happens to be covered in this week’s lesson).
Other students starting to break sweat include Stephen Nunes looking at environment and education; Natalie Chillington covering grassroots environmental stories outside of the UK; Hayley Smith covering environmental stories around science and technology; and Emma Foster’s blog on environmental issues relating to business, industry and lifestyle.
If you’re able to visit and comment on any of their blogs, I’m sure they’d appreciate it.
February 22nd, 2008
It seems the Reading Evening Post video saga has another chapter in it. Adam Javurek has emailed to tell me that they’ve disabled the links function on the YouTube page. So what did look like this:
Now looks like this:
On the good side, at least it means the Reading Evening Post check on their YouTube videos (or perhaps the web person told them they were getting an unusual number of hits coming from YouTube).
But on the bad side, was it worth it? On the one hand, it’s clearly an attempt to stop people clicking through to the (at last count) three sites criticising the production and editorial values of the piece.
But did they think beyond that knee-jerk reaction?
Firstly, it means you’re not allowing people to look at the debate generated by video. And hold on - that means you’re also stopping people clicking through to your own site.
Wasn’t that the point of putting it on YouTube?
Secondly, someone - in this case Adam - is likely to spot the ruse and… oh yes, just when everyone was starting to forget about it, here we are still talking about that awful video.
And now we’re talking about some flawed decisions regarding online distribution too.
I won’t even touch on the censorship issues this raises, and the fuel this adds to the suspicion by readers that journalists can’t take criticism.
Anyway, let’s end on a more positive note: this video from the same YouTube channel may be a bit rough and ready but at least it’s got some ideas and leaves the office:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIBuWWWToak]
In fact, it even generated a follow-up.
February 22nd, 2008
The past decade has seen more change in the craft of journalism than perhaps any other. Some of the changes have erupted into the mainstream; others have nibbled at the edges. Over at the Press Gazette website I count the ways…
PS: I’ll be publishing the ‘blogger’s cut’ with 400 extra words in a week or so.
February 21st, 2008
I’ve managed to secure sponsorship from the European Journalism Centre to (initially) support up to five attendees to JEEcamp. So if you’d like to come to JEEcamp but had discounted it because of cost, contact Kathlyn Clore at the European Journalism Centre on clore@ejc.nl
She will be able to identify if you qualify for some sponsorship.
Many thanks to the EJC for this - it was their European Bloggers Unconference that inspired the decision to make this an unconference in the first place.
And if you missed the original post about what JEEcamp is, you can find it here. There are already at least 30 attendees signed up on the unconference wiki and Facebook event page. They include:
- John Thompson, Journalism.co.uk
- Rick Waghorn, My Football Writer (Norwich, UK)
- Nicolas Kayser-Bril, JournalismEnterprise.com
- Oliver Luft, Journalism.co.uk
- Tim Hood, Yoosk.com
- Simon Harper, Birmingham Post (Birmingham, UK) and Cul-de-Sac Online (currently in development)
- Chris Leggett, MNA Digital
- Will Beavis, MNA Digital
- Gareth Main, Bearded magazine, Fleeing from Pigeons Limited, The Greatest Game Rugby League blog (Birmingham, UK)
- Julie Martin www.gazettecommunities.com Reader Content Editor, Evening Gazette Teesside (Trinity Mirror)
- Laura Oliver, Journalism.co.uk
- Nigel Eccles, Hubdub
- James Fryer, SoGlos.com
- Kyle MacRae, Scoopt
- Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk
- Sarah Kennedy, FootballFanCast.com
- Mark Comerford Stockholm, Sweden (markmedia)
- John Ndege, ScribbleSheet.co.uk
- Ilana Fox, The Sun
- Tim Neale, OhmyNews International
- Joanna Geary, Birmingham Post journalist and blogger (Birmingham, UK)
- Ken Olxey, Sunday Sun, Deputy Editor
- Louise Bolotin, freelance journalist
- Bhuwan Thapaliya, Global Politician, Associte Editor
- Kathlyn Clore, European Journalism Centre, Associate editor
- Bernd Kapeller,European Journalism Centre, Associate producer
- David Higgerson, Liverpool Daily Post digital editor
- Sabuhi Mir, freelance journalist, http://www.sabuhimir.net
February 21st, 2008
I thought the following two Twitter posts from journalism student Tuuli Platner neatly demonstrate how the platform can be used to involve readers in the drama of newsgathering and build anticipation (read from the bottom up):
Now, don’t you want to read the story that came out of it?
February 20th, 2008
Two days ago I blogged about some bad newspaper video from the Reading Evening Post, and ended
“Let’s see if I can generate more views from this blog than from their own site - at least it will prove the value of making your video embeddable.”
As of today the video has received 145 visits via this blog compared to the 81 from the newspaper site. There are also a further 27 visits from two other blogs. In other words, two out of three viewers came to the video through viral means.
Verdict: if you want people to know about your video offering, make your video embeddable. And do something that people will want to embed - preferably something good, not embarrassing.
February 20th, 2008
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