Friday, June 22, 2007

How to write online?

In journalism, one of the main questions is how to write news online? In an interview from Poynter Online with Chris Nodder, one of the group of Jacob Nielsen, some interesting point are discussed.

- The use of text is still very important online. Text gives the online readers the possibility to scan the information and to use it as hyperlinks or even to manipulate it. With video and audio, this is more difficult. Video and audio make online readers frustrated as they can't scan through the video or audio files. Audio and video as richter media can even be poorer in contrast with digital texts, Nodder concludes. In addition, past eye tracking studies did find out that most of the videos online don't work as on television as they make the online news consumers bored.

With regard to my study, this make sense. It's mostly argued that there's a lack of integrated use of video and audio files in online news(papers), mostly assuming that the use of various modalities of information should make the article more valuable. When video and audio files are indeed frustrating online readers because they can't manipulate them, this will have an effect on the information retrieval and the information-processing, probably in a way that an integration of audio and video will make the readers invest more cognitive sources in oriƫntating and frustrating than in elaborating and processing.

- The inverted pyramid is proposed as the best structure to write online, by telling the conclusion at the start of the article so that online scanners are getting fast to the information they want to know. However, this vision is somewhat countered by three articles, one in communication Research by Yaros , that in the European Journal of Communication by Machill and this article from Poynter online. The first two articles are discussed in this article on DNR.nl. The conclusion is that both in online and television news, journalist must forget the inverted pyramid structure and start to use a more narrative form of telling the story.
In my study, I'm also measuring the effects of the news structure, but not the use of the inverted pyramid or narrative style. I'm studying the use (and sometimes lack) of internal and external hyperlinks, in order to measure the desorientation and scanning behavior which results from this use of this non-lineair structure.

- The last thing that this article learned me was that online journalist should use sign posts to make their texts more easy to read. Editors can use titles, summaries, bullet lists, bold, ... to get the attention of the reader to the core of the information.

Indeed, the use of advisory cues (as I call them in my study) are important when studying the online reading. I do not focus on features like bullet lists or use of titles, but more on logo's like 'breaking news' and time annotations that symbolise the freshness and value of the news article.

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