Here’s the 3rd in my series of classes in online journalism. Having already set up an RSS readers and Delicious account, a Twitter account and a blog, this week they start the news website, and learn about writing and producing for the web:

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Continuing the final part of this series (part 1: Community is here) I look at conversation. I look at why conversation is becoming a form of publishing itself, why journalists need to be a part of that conversation, and a range of ways they can join in.

Conversation is publishing

In the first dotcom boom it used to be said that ‘Content is King‘. It’s not. As Cory Doctorow points out:

“If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

Jay Rosen, talking about journalism in 2004, noted that it was moving ‘from a lecture to a conversation‘.

And a year later Jeff Jarvis argued “Conversation is the kingdom“:

“In this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.”

Look closer, and you could argue that the distinctions between conversation and publishing in an online medium are being eroded. Everything that we say is recorded, linkable, distributable.

Conversation is publishing.

The one-to-many relationships built by print and broadcast media have been disrupted by the arrival of the internet. By mixing these with the one-to-one cultures of telephony it has created a new, emerging, culture of many-to-many relationships.

For a long time the most popular use of the internet has been email. For the net generation, that is being replaced by social networking and instant messaging. All demonstrate that people don’t want to passively consume content online – they want to use it, produce it, and exchange it.

When the Chinese earthquake (among others) happened, it was reported on social networking sites before news websites. The information moved very quickly from people talking about what was happening to them; to people talking about what was happening to their friends; to people talking about what was happening to their friends’ friends: conversation.

Meanwhile, communities formed to pass on and clarify information more efficiently than the news organisations (for example, translating accounts, mapping, and mashing up). An online journalist who ignores this is ignoring a fundamental element of their job.

Conversation and community are closely linked: any editorial plan involving one is flawed without consideration of the other. Conversation leads to community, but it’s difficult to have a conversation without a community to begin with. It’s a chicken and egg situation.

Blogs are a classic example of generating a community from a conversation. Individual posts can gather global traffic if they touch a nerve, as conversations spread well beyond their points of origin – and back again. But how do you maintain that community when the conversation ends? (Should you even try?)

Building a conversation out of a community is perhaps harder, and why news websites have not always been successful in their attempts to do so. It is like having a room full of people with shared interests but who are too shy to talk.

You need an ice breaker.

The Professional Conversationalist

An online journalist should be a mix of the ideal party guest and the ideal party host, taking part in – and stimulating – conversations in a number of ways:

• Be involved in your communities, online and offline. Comment on blogs, post on forums, correct and update wikis, converse on Twitter, join and contribute to social network groups.
• Open up your own work for others to contribute editorially: include an email address; allow comments. In particular, don’t structure your work as a dead end: present it as work in progress; ask questions and leave them unanswered; acknowledge gaps in your knowledge; invite contributions there and elsewhere.
• Open your work up technically too if possible: make your content portable by providing an RSS feed; widgets users can place on their webpages; wikis for them to edit; or even raw data for mashups.
• Not only that, but you must respond to those contributions: That means reading comments on your own work and responding to them, in the comments as well as in the occasional follow-up post. That means looking at who’s linking to your work and posting comments there, or linking to them in your own work with an acknowledgement.
• You must show explicitly that you are part of the conversation, by linking to sources (who will in turn know that they are being quoted either through pingback or traffic)
• And finally, most importantly: you must listen. That means reading blogs, forums and other media in their sector, and then starting from the beginning again: comment, respond, link, open up.

It’s a conversation loop:

[UPDATE: A similar cycle was identified by Jason mKey in 2011)

As a journalist, doing all of these things has 4 significant advantages:

1. Your work will be informed by user contributions, and better for it
2. You'll be more likely to be 'there' when a story breaks - and to understand the context
3. As you talk about your work, and involve users in it, you will be distributing it as well. If your motivation is commercial, replace 'conversation' with 'distribution'. Nothing works better online.
4. Nobody likes a tourist. You'll be building the trust and social capital needed for other users to give you the information that you need - or to help you find it.

Without the help of your community, without an effort to engage in conversation, your work will be one-dimensional, as flat as the paper it used to be printed on. And the journalist who doesn't contribute to their communities and its conversations will look increasingly like Doctorow's sociopath. Not the kind of person people will want to talk to, or read.

--

Read the full BASIC Principles of Online Journalism series:

• B is for Brevity
• A is for Accessibility
• S is for Scannability
• I is for Interactivity
• C is for Community and Conversation
  

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]]> http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/09/18/basic-principles-of-online-journalism-c-is-for-community-conversation-pt2-conversation/feed/ 22 http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/09/15/basic-principles-of-online-journalism-c-is-for-community-conversation-pt1-community/ http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/09/15/basic-principles-of-online-journalism-c-is-for-community-conversation-pt1-community/#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:00:15 +0000 Paul Bradshaw http://onlinejournalismblog.wordpress.com/?p=211

In the final parts of this series I look at two concepts that have become increasingly central to online journalism in the post-Web 2.0 era: community and conversation. I look at why journalists need to understand how both have changed, how they are linked, and how to embrace them in your work processes.

Conversation and community have always been the lifeblood of journalism. Good journalism has always sought to serve a community; commercially, journalism has always needed large or affluent communities to support it. And good journalism – whether informative or sensationalist – has always generated conversation.

Now, in a hyperlinked world, community and conversation are more important than ever.

But they have also changed.

The community is now the media

The bar has been raised.

In a networked world the faceless, passive, amorphous masses of print and broadcast journalism are an anachronism. Journalists can no longer stand outside communities supplying them with information. Communities can supply themselves – and each other – thank you very much:

• When your former audience has the same tools as you to publish, publishing isn’t your unique selling point.
• When they have access to the same information, newsgathering isn’t your unique selling point.
• And when they can pass on news at the click of a button, even distribution isn’t your unique selling point.

When your community has this much power (if this is the Green Ink Brigade they have undergone significant rearmament), you are best advised to stop trying to beat them, and start learning how to join them – or at least form a peaceful alliance.

Journalists need communities more than ever before – not just as buyers, but as active contributors, moderators, and editors: a 21st century ‘news organisation’ doesn’t have walls; it has networks. And persuading users to join your network is one of the biggest challenges facing journalists. For some online journalists, it is becoming the core of their job.

“Community organising IS media”

David Cohn puts it this way:

“It’s often said that the job description for journalists are changing and that part of the new job is ‘community manager’ – sometimes called the ‘network weaver.’

“What they do is organize communities – and while it might not FEEL like media, it is. We may not call them “journalists” but they are helping to inform citizens so they can make decisions in a healthy democracy. They collect, filter and distribute information. Sounds like journalism to me.”

But it’s far from easy, and requires a change of focus.

While news organisations have lost their monopolies on publishing, information and distribution, journalists can still contribute to a community on a number of important fronts:

• Time: whereas most users can only contribute to a community in their spare time, a professional journalist employed as a community manager is paid to do the job full time, has more time for ‘social grooming’, and can break Dunbar’s limit on group size. In the 1-9-90 rule, journalists can be part of the 1% who are heavy contributors (the other 9% are occasional contributors, and the final 90% do not contribute).
• Experience: for the same reason, journalists – particularly those who move into community management – are likely to have more experience of organising, motivating, and communicating with people (if they haven’t, they need to start building it).
• An eye across a number of sectors: journalists cannot always compete on expertise – they are generally paid to be ‘jacks of all trades’, generalists who can move from motoring to business news – but this has its advantages in having contacts across sectors and sometimes seeing the bigger picture.
• Financial support: it can be tempting to believe that ‘if you build it, they will come’, to trust in throwing money at technology to serve up a platform that will attract users. But it’s not that simple. A recent study found that despite 6% of commercially built online communities having over $1 million spent on them, “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail.” Why? “Businesses launching online communities repeat a series of blunders. First, they have a tendency to get seduced by bells and whistles and blow their online-community budget on technology. Businesses [should] spend resources identifying and reaching out to potential community members instead of investing in software that makes predictions, or even social-networking technology.”
• A brand: think of it as the big 19th century statue in the city centre: not useful in itself, but an obvious landmark to congregate around. News websites have the advantage of thousands of existing users, and so don’t have to build from scratch. But the brand can be as much of a handicap as an advantage. It means users come with a number of preconceptions about your motivations (commercial; mercenary), previous bad experiences, and expectations (what’s in it for me?). These all need to be addressed very early on.

Plug these into community management and there is the potential for success – but this is only part of the picture. Another part is a change in how we see community in the first place.

When is a community a community?

Too often community is used as a synonym for ‘market’. A community of “middle aged upper class readers in Newstown” is not a community: that’s a demographic. “First time dads in Newsdistrict” are more likely to be a community. Indeed, so is “first time dads”, and that’s why magazines seem to have an easier time of this, focusing as they do on:

• Communities based on shared passions or hobbies
• Communities based on shared beliefs
• Communities based on shared employment

But with the web we can go further still:

• Communities based on shared history (e.g. school, event)
• Communities based on shared problem
• Communities based on shared cause

These markets were too small and/or too volatile previously to support a publication – now that’s no longer the case. The costs of publishing online are so low, and the lead-in times so instant, that it has become incredibly easy to set up a publication aimed at a community almost as quickly as that community forms – or even before.

In comparison, the idea of setting up a publication to serve ‘news’ to people living within a 50-mile radius becomes unsustainably generic in an online environment: the individual communities that make up that market can be picked off one by one.

So. All that talk about “serving the community”? Now journalists need to prove they mean it. Through providing information, yes – but also support, tools and platforms, something that Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube woke up to long ago.

Whatever you do, you need to start by joining a community’s conversations.

Read part two: Conversations on Thursday.

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Part four of this five-part series looks at how interactivity forms the basis of true online journalism, and explores ways to think about interactivity in practice. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

In his 2001 book Online Journalism, Jim Hall argues that, in the age of the web, interactivity could be added to impartiality, objectivity and truth as a core value of journalism. It is that important.

Interactivity is central to how journalism has been changed by the arrival of the internet. Whereas the news industries of print, radio and TV placed control firmly in the hands of the publishers and journalists, online you try to control people at your peril.

It is important to remember that people use the web on devices – whether a computer, mobile phone or PDA – with cultural histories of usefulness or utility, very different to the cultural histories of television, radio or even print.

People go online to do something. Companies that help with that process tend to prosper online. Those that attempt to curtail users’ ability to do things with their content often find themselves on the end of a backlash.

News is, of course, a service. But up until now news organisations have been under the mistaken impression that it is a product. The web is reminding them otherwise.

What is interactivity?

Interactivity is not video, or ‘multimedia’; it is not flashy bells and whistles. At its core, it is about giving the user control.

One way of conceptualising this is to identify the types of control that users might have. In doing this, I would suggest two dimensions along which interactivity operates.

Firstly, time and space; secondly input and output.

Control over time and space

Where broadcast required the user to be present at a particular time, and print to wait for the next edition, technologies such as Video On Demand (VOD), personal video recorders (PVR) such as Sky+ and TiVo, podcasts, mobile phones and websites allow the audience to consume at a time convenient to them. The PDF newspaper is another less successful development that also allows readers to avoid the dependence on print and distribution cycles.

Similarly, whereas television has normally required the user to be physically present in front of a static set, the spread of mobile phones, mp3 players and portable mpeg players and wifi laptops allow the audience to consume in a space convenient to them. Portable radio and portable newspapers have always had this advantage.

In mapping these it becomes clear that control over time and space tends to centre on hardware, and miniaturisation.

Control over input and output

With linear media such as TV, radio and print, the consumer relies on the ability of the producer, editor, etc. to structure how content is presented – in other words, the output. New media allows the audience to take some of that control. Examples include:

• At a basic level, hyperlinks allow the reader to dictate their experience of ‘content’ through their choice of clicks.
• With online video and audio, the user can pause, fast-forward, etc. – and if it has been split into ‘chunks’, the user can choose which bit of a longer video or audio piece they experience.
• RSS allows users to create their own media product, combining feeds from newspapers, broadcasters, bloggers, and even del.icio.us tags or Google News search terms.
• Database-driven content allows the user to shape output based on their input – e.g. by entering their postcode they can read content specific to their area. At a general level search engines provide a similar service.
• And Flash interactives allow the user to influence output in a range of ways. This may be as simple as selecting from a range of audio, video, text and still image options. It may be playing a game or quiz, where their interaction (e.g. what answers they get right, how they perform) shapes the output they experience.

In terms of input, again, the old media model was one that relied on the producer, editor, etc. to decide on the editorial agenda, and create the products. The audience may have had certain avenues of communication – the letter to the editor; the radio phone-in; the ‘Points of View‘, but the staging, shaping, editing and distribution of that was still up to professional media producers.

The new media model, as Dan Gillmor points out, is one that moves from a lecture to a conversation. So:

• Blogs, podcasts, vlogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc. allow the audience to publish their own media
• Forums, message boards, chatrooms and comments on mainstream media blogs allow the audience to discuss and influence the content of mainstream media, as well as engaging with each other, bypassing the media
• Live chats with interviewees and media staff do the same.
• User generated content/citizen journalism sees mainstream publishers actively seeking out input from consumers, from emails and texts to mobile phone images, video and audio.
• Wikis allow the audience to create their own collaborative content, which may be facilitated by mainstream media
• Social recommendation software like del.icio.us, Digg, etc. allow users to influence the ‘headline’ webpages through bookmarking and tags.
• A similar but separate example is how page view statistics can be used by publishers to rank content by popularity (often displayed side by side with the editorial view of what are the ‘top stories’)
• I hesitate to add the last example but I will anyway: email. Although we could always, in theory, contact producers and editors by telephone, they didn’t publish their numbers on the ten o’clock news. Email addresses, however, are printed at the end of articles; displayed on screen alongside news reports; read out on radio; and of course displayed online.

In mapping these examples you might argue that this second dimension of interactivity is more about software: from email clients, web browsers and hyperlinks through to content management systems such as blogs, wikis and forums, and more recently web-based services like social bookmarking sites, website statistics and social networking.

What does this mean for journalists?

For journalists, the rise of interactivity means thinking about how you can give control to your readers – who are now, of course, users.That means giving control over the time and place they use it – so, making content downloadable, for example, or bookmarkable, or emailable, or bloggable. Allowing them to put it on their social networking page. Allowing them to sign up for email or text or RSS updates.

It means putting your content where the user is, not the other way: which means thinking of places like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, and Flickr – in turn, driving new traffic back to your own site.

And it means giving control over the input and output – ‘calling out’ for contributions when you first start working on a story (usually via your blog or Twitter account); allowing comments on what you’ve written; creating a space for further development and discussion via a forum or wiki or chatroom. Making your raw material available so others can build on it, or even point out corrections.

It means thinking, when relevant, not of linear products like a 500 word article or 3-minute package, but packages of information that the user can navigate in their own way, from a mix of audio, video, text and animation to database-driven packages that deliver specific results to specific enquiries.

It means thinking of ways to engage the user: could we do a game about this? A quiz? Create a tool? Invite users to pose the questions to our interviewee? Involve them in the investigation from the start?

And it means realising that the process is not one-way (broadcast), or even two-way (between journalist and user, i.e. feedback), but three-way (between journalist and user, and between user and user), which is the subject of the final part of this BASIC Principles series: Community and Conversation.

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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.

Part 4: I is for Interactivity can be found here.

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In the second part of this five-part series, I explore how adaptability has not only become a key quality for the journalist – but for the information they deal with on a daily basis too. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

The adaptable journalist

A key skill for any journalist in the new media age, whatever medium they’re working in, is adaptability. The age of the journalist who only writes text, or who only records video, or audio, is passing. Today, the newspaper and magazine, the television and the radio programme all have an accompanying website. And that website is, increasingly, filled with a whole range of media, which could include any of the following:

• (Hyper)Text
• Audio
• Video
• Still images
• Audio slideshows
• Animation
• Flash interactivity
• Database-driven elements
• Blogs
• Microblogging/Text/email alerts (Twitter)
• Community elements – forums, wikis, social networking, polls, surveys
• Live chats
• Mapping
• Mashups

This does not mean that the online journalist has to be an expert in all of these fields, but they should have media literacy in as many of these fields as possible: in other words, a good online journalist should be able to see a story and think:

• ‘That story would have real impact on video’;
• or: ‘A Flash interactive could explain this better than anything else’;
• or ‘This story would benefit from me linking to the original reports and some blog commentary’;
• or ‘Involving the community in this story would really engage, and hopefully bring out some great leads’.

The person who eventually films the video, or creates the Flash element, may be someone else, particularly as news organisations begin to understand that no single journalist can do all these things, or identify individuals and teams who produce the podcast, the video packages, or the Flash interactives, or who manage the community elements. But the ideas should come from every member connected with the online newsroom. And ideas always come first.

Skills come after, but the online journalist should have laid some foundations in a range of areas.

• They should be able to write well, succinctly, and quickly – for more than one medium, if possible.
• They should be able to find accurate information and reliable sources online and offline, quickly, and they should have a collection of RSS feeds keeping them in touch with their area.
• They should understand some basic principles of video, audio and still images.
• They should have played with editing software.
• They should have played around with examples of journalistic interactivity and web-based databases.
• They should understand online communities like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or their own sector of the blogosphere – if possible, they should already be a productive member of one.

Some of these foundations only require some very light background reading, some just involve exploring good examples of online journalism, or tinkering on free software. The one area that does need time, attention and practice, are the core skills of newsgathering and news production.

The adaptable content

It is not only the journalist who benefits from being adaptable. In the new media age, information needs to be adaptable as well.

Adrian Holovaty, in his article ‘A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change‘, points out that much of what journalists gather is structured information that has the potential to be repurposed by either the reader or another journalist – his examples include:

• “An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes.
• “A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.
• “A birth has parents, a child (or children) and a date.
• “A college graduate has a home state, a home town, a degree, a major and graduation year.
• “Every Senate, House and Governor race in the U.S. has location, analysis, demographic information, previous election results, campaign-finance information and more.
• “Every known detainee at Guantanamo Bay has an approximate age, birthplace, formal charges and more.”

Once this information is made adaptable – for example, by inclusion in a database – it can be presented in a range of ways. A level results can be plotted on a map, for instance; sports stats can be displayed graphically; news can be displayed specific to the reader’s own location; or journalists can check to see how many crimes have occurred around a certain location.

The first way an online journalist should be making information adaptable is to tag it. For newsgathering, a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us is essential. These allow you to ‘bookmark’ any online source with a series of tags, enabling them to be quickly found when required (and that’s not touching on the ‘social’ element, which allows you to see who else has bookmarked the same page, and what else they are bookmarking, which can lead to some useful leads).

For news publishing, blogging services like WordPress and Blogger have a tagging (or ‘keywords’) facility built in; so do photo-sharing site Flickr and video-sharing site YouTube. And newspapers like the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo are starting to incorporate tagging in all stories.

You might also be working with a content management system that allows metatagging or mapping. These amount to the same thing: information about the story.

Beyond tagging there are a number of other ways to make information adaptable. Databases and spreadsheets are obvious ways. Managing the information on a big story using a spreadsheet can prove useful if you need to make that information public at some point, or need to hand it over to someone else who can work magic with it. In general, it’s just good practice that makes your life easier.

RSS is another way to make information adaptable. If your stories, a subject section or a search is available as a feed others can more easily combine it with other tools (e.g. mapping), aggregate it, filter it and do other things with it.

And of course the simple act of making your content downloadable or embeddable makes it more adaptable. The choice to stream video, for example, prevents users from doing potentially interesting things with it. Allowing a full download – even in different formats – opens up potential for all sorts of creativity from users and other journalists. All of which, ultimately, should drive more people back to your site and your stories.

Part three: S is for Scannability can be found here.

PHP Freelancer

In the first part of a five-part series, I explore how and why a talent for brevity is one of the basic skills an online journalist needs – whether writing an article or employing multimedia. This will form part of a forthcoming book on online journalism – comments very much invited.

It shouldn’t have to be said that the web is different, but I’ll say it anyway: the web is different. It is not print, it is not television, it is not radio.

So why write content for the web in the same way that you might write for a newspaper or a news broadcast?

Organisations used to do this, and some still do. It was called ‘shovelware’, a process by which content created for another medium (generally print) was ‘shovelled’ onto the web with nary a care for whether that was appropriate or not.

It was not.

People read websites very differently to how they read newspapers, watch television or listen to radio. For a start, they read 25% slower than they do with print – this is because computer screens have a much lower resolution than print: 72 dots in every square inch compared to around 150-300 in newspapers and magazines (this may change, but usage patterns are likely to stay the same for some time yet).

As a result, you need to communicate your story in less time than you would in print. You need to develop brevity.

Forms of brevity

Brevity comes on a number of different levels. At the most obvious level, shorter articles tend to work better online because most people struggle to read long documents on screen, or find scrolling too much hassle if they’re looking for something specific or succinct.

This doesn’t mean you should write a 500-word snippet rather than the grand 3,000 word opus you were planning – but it does mean you should consider splitting that opus into smaller chunks (chunking): six 500 word sections, for example, each with a particular focus. You can always provide a link to a printable version of all the parts together.

That said, don’t split arbitrarily, or for the sake of it: every webpage is a potential entry point, and users need to be able to instantly orientate themselves.

More important than the length of the article overall, within the article itself, paragraphs should be succinct. Stick to one concept per paragraph. Once you’ve made your point, move on to the next par.

This may seem simplistic writing at first, but you soon become used to it. It’s how BBC reports are written online – see how effective it is.

Brevity in video and audio

Brevity is equally important when producing multimedia material. For the medium that brought us YouTube, anything over three minutes is too long.

One simple technical reason is bandwidth – even now that the majority of users are on broadband, a significant proportion remain on dial-up, including overseas users.

Even those on broadband will not want to wait for video or audio to download, or their connection to slow down while they do.

Once again, this does not necessarily mean editing your whole story down to three minutes; it means a chunking approach to multimedia: breaking it down into its constituent parts.

As Andy Dickinson explains it, this is a non-linear approach. Because unlike with TV or radio your user can enter the story at any point they choose: this might be the interview with the witness – or it might be, more specifically, the chunk where they describe what they saw. It might be raw footage of the aftermath. It might be the contextual information.

In short, you are released from the pressure of condensing everything to a three minute package (although you can do that as well), and instead provide readers with a range of paths to pursue.

Brevity works particularly well online because it allows for more effective distribution: others can link to the specific element they are commenting on, or even embed it on their site.

What’s more, it provides the raw material for further journalism: a user might decide to re-edit the material to provide a different narrative; or mash it up with maps or databases; or they might incorporate it into further investigation into a particular issue – all of which further distributes your good name, and provides further material for you to build on.

Part two: A is for Adaptability, can be found here.

PHP Freelancer