Newsletter No. 4: Content and design
I think the key to morphing from an ink-stained wretch to a pixel-stained one is easier than most journalists think. In some ways, it is a return to our roots. Especially with writing.
Parenthetically, let me toss in here that I know that this blog and the site are supposed to be about design, not writing. But even design is about the content; without content, there is no need for design. In fact, I believe design IS content, i.e., they are conjoined, but that’s for another post.
We have to accept the fact that most newspaper readers are time-starved. Few readers spend an hour each morning with two newspapers as I do. Then there are online sites and news on the tube. Each takes away from the time available for media consumption.
It’s not that potential readers are uninterested in news and information, it’s that they have too much to choose from. So our job is to make the newspaper easy to get, easy to access, easy and quick to read, filled with content important to them, and of course, accurate and fair, but with a dash of flair.
This is why I say we need to keep the design in mind as we conceptualize, assign and write the story, whether for the print or the web product.
Research by Poynter has shown that only a small percentage of body copy in a print newspaper gets read anyway (about 25 percent, as I recall), so why do we insist on filling pages with long columns of gray body text? Some stories are worth the space, if they are important and are good reads. But many, if not most, longer stories in your average local newspaper are much longer than they need to be.
One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Blaise Pascal, is something like: “I am sorry this letter is so long, I did not have the time to write a short one.” Newspaper journalists can often say the same thing about stories.
So even if you are writing for print, but especially on the web, aim for fewer words. Save the long stories for when you have a good one. (Here is where the design comes in….) On the web, write the story about half as long as you would have written it for print. Provide links to archived stories, if you can. Don’t make the reader scroll too much. On the other hand, don’t just take a print narrative and chop it in thirds. Instead, tell the story in three parts — think meaningful subheads — for each page. Get photos or video of anything you can.
Instead, think in terms of bulleted lists, pullout data, maps, graphics, ANYTHING, but six more grafs of sentences that don’t do as good a job, especially for your readers in a hurry. This is true for print, as well as the web.
Another old saying I like is: if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail. If you think of yourself as a writer, the best way to present information is a story. Instead, think of your self as an interpreter of information who translates it into news, a presenter of information in a variety of visually interesting forms.
The visual display of information solves two problems: space and visual interest on the page. Actually, it solves another: making your information more valuable to your potential readers because they can get what they want in an easy to access package.
Next time, we’ll go over some examples of how to do this.
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Bob Bohle :: bob@newsdesignschool.com