Online Journalism Review» Nora Paul

The Best of the SND.ies

Nora Paul — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:13:01 +0000

Judging online journalism awards always is a great opportunity to see the best work newsrooms are doing. But as those of us who have been competition judges know, we usually view entries in only a couple categories – best sports section, best online commentary, etc. We don’t get to see the full range of work that has been submitted.

That’s why judging the final round of the SND.ies awards, the Society for News Design’s Best of Multimedia Design Competition, can be an educational experience. This year, nine judges gathered in late August at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill for an intense two days of reviewing, discussing, and evaluating a wide variety of entries. Something unique about the SND.ies is the lack of a requirement that the judges designate a gold, silver or bronze winner in each category. There may, in fact, be no entries that make it to gold status, or silver, or any award level. It makes the discussion of each entry focused much more on its individual merits rather than comparing it with others in the category.

As a judge (Nora Paul) and the competition coordinator (Laura Ruel) we observed some distinct trends in multimedia design. Without revealing the winners (they will be announced on Oct. 13 at the SND awards banquet in Boston) we’d like to discuss the types of entries that we saw, the elevation in the quality of entries during the past few years, and the kinds of usability questions that this next level of multimedia seem to raise.

Five types of entries

First of all, we want to say how impressed we are with the variety of ways journalists are using multimedia forms to tell stories. This year, we observed five distinct types of entries:

Animated infographics

Infotoys

Narratives

You are there

BOPs (Big Ole Packages!)

Animated infographics

These entries are informational graphics that explain a sequence of events in an accident, or the steps in a process or show how something works. This type of presentation style has become more sophisticated and clean since the competition began in 2002. The influence of elmundo.es’ high quality work in this area is clear. Most of these entries have a simple, streamlined look, with an appropriate use of white space. They are basic line drawings that reveal complex working parts, and – in some cases – provide a linear explanation of a sequence of events.

One of this year’s finalists, NYTimes.com’s recreation of Cory Lidle’s airplane crash into a New York apartment building, shows the power of animation to detail the sequence of events.

It is educational to see how the initial, static graphic evolved into the animated infographic produced a few days later, after all the details of the ill-fated flight were available.

Initial, static graphic for print publication.

Animated storytelling graphic

Infotoys

We like to call this “data you can play with.” Although we have seen this form in years past, this year’s entries seem to be pushing this storytelling method a bit further.

Take a look at this package by indystar.com. It is an excellent use of a controlled, interactive graphic that lets users explore statistical information.

Indystar.com used statistical data to provide an historical overview of the Colts.

Another good example of customizable data came in the form of a NYTimes.com piece, “Is it Better to Buy or Rent?” This interactive helps consumers evaluate data in a changing market. It is extremely useful. The flexibility of the interface and the factors considered when providing advice about buying versus renting is sophisticated and easy to use. Moreover this presentation has a great shelf life. It can benefit readers for years to come.

This NYTimes.com interactive is an excellent example of being able to customize the content output based on your personal settings.

“Infotoys” with crime data also made their way into the pool of entries. While this isn’t a new concept, inquirer.philly.com’s display does more than just take the data and marry it with a map. It takes it to another level by providing a simple interface that allows users to customize views. It also provides contextual information about the number of homicides.

Philadelphia Homicides in 2006 goes beyond the traditional crime data map.

Multimedia narratives

We’re categorizing these pieces as self-contained packages that follow a single – somewhat linear – narrative thread. This year we saw an excellent uses of images and increasingly well produced and well synced audio overlays. We believe the use of Soundslides, a production tool for still image and audio Web presentations, has helped journalists to focus more on the content and less on the technology. Consequently, they are moving multimedia narratives to a new, more advanced level.

One example is Palmbeachpost.com’s simple, elegant, touching narrative about train jumping. It is well focused, simple and has great news value. Offering the presentation in both Spanish and English adds to its appeal.

Train Jumping by palmbeachpost.com is an impressive, touching multimedia narrative.

You are there

High level graphics and embedded POV/panoramic images are being used to create “you are there” packages that give users a sense of location and exploration. These allow the users the control to customize their viewing experiences.

Elpais.es used beautiful 3D illustrations with just enough animation to let the user get a close-up look at Formula 1 racing.

Formula 1 racing comes to life with this elpais.com presentation.

In “The Met’s New Greek and Roman Galleries” by NYTimes.com, 3-D renderings and panoramas place viewers inside a new area of the museum. It is a strong interactive that gives the user a large amount of control with clean 3-D work, smooth, easy-to-use panoramas and elegant design.

NYTimes.com: The Met’s New Greek and Roman Galleries

BOPs: Big Ole Packages

BOPs are large compilations of storytelling materials such as the text, videos, audio slide shows, animated graphics and interactive applications. These ambitious packages tell complex stories with many layers of information. Two special challenges for producers of these pieces include:

Organization: Designers of the most successful of these story packages resisted the temptation to organize these pieces by media form. The winning entries didn’t use menu items such as “video,” “photos,” etc., but rather used descriptive story labels that summarized the story areas by topic.

Interface: With so much information, the most successful of these packages had navigation that helped spark user interest in the story. Navigation also was intuitive enough to allow people to easily and effortlessly find their way into all the material – and just easily find a way out.

One example of a BOP is a St. Pete Times’ piece about Florida’s wetlands. In most cases it uses the best media forms to tell particular parts of the story. For example, an interactive graphic clearly explains how wetlands work. To add depth to the text stories, the designers use highlighted links to primary source documents that aid in revealing politicians’ true leanings. The videos, graphics and photos each complement each other without duplicating content.

This St. Pete Times’ Web presentation about an ecological crisis uses multiple forms of media to tell the story.

Another BOP example is a class project by students from UNC-Chapel Hill, Universidad de los Andes and Universidad del Desarrollo that documents life in the Atacama Desert, Chile – the driest place on earth. The animated graphics, informative audio, powerful images and carefully chosen video combine to provide a great example of integrated multimedia storytelling.

Atacama Stories is a large-scale student project that combines storytelling methods to provide an in-depth look at this desert environment.

The challenge

It is clear from this competiton that the skills in multimedia use have become more sophisticated in some newsrooms and the styles that seem to be most effective are getting copied and re-used to very good effect. While this competition is about recognizing great work, the real winners are the news audience.

Navigating slide shows: What do people choose when every choice is possible?

Nora Paul — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:59:53 +0000

During the month of May we rented the Tobii eyetracker to conduct a variety of studies about online news design decisions. Different designs for displaying “breaking news” and supplemental links were tested. We also looked at three variations of New York Times story level pages (the difference was the intensity and variety of supplemental information links available.) All three of these studies need some time to digest the data (from both the eyetracking behavior recorded and the survey responses by the participants.) They will be reported on in later columns.

But as a little “add-on” study, we asked 34 of the people who did one of the other tests to also take a look at the Washington Post’s “Cuba by Korda” slide presentation.

We were interested in seeing how people decided to navigate through this package which included every possible option for moving through the slides.

There was a thumbnail view:

You could click on an arrow next to the photo to go forward or back. Or you could use the “Next” button.

There was an “autoplay” option that let you change the speed of the slide transitions.

Or you could click on the individual numbers lined along the bottom which would reveal a thumbnail of the image associated with that number.

We had a number of questions about use of this complicated navigational suite.

Given all these options – which one(s) did the user select?

Did one navigation style result in more complete viewing of the images?

Did people move linearly or non-linearly through the set of slides?

Did one navigation style result in more complete reading of the associated narrative?

With this study we simply sent people to the site and asked them to look through the package as they would if a friend had sent them the link. There were no instructions about how long to look, just to go through the site until they had had enough. We did not ask them any questions about the experience or their preferences, we just recorded their eye-movements on the screen. Here’s what we found in an analysis of the eyetrack recordings:

Navigation choice

Of the 34 participants, their first navigational choice:

Next 19 (56%)

Numbers 8 (23%)

Arrow 5 (15%)

Autoplay 2 ( 6%)

Thumbnail 0

11 of the 34 switched between two different navigation methods, and 3 of those 11 used three methods (not repeating any of them.)

Of the 19 that started with the “Next” button:

13 used “Next” the entire time

4 used “Next” for an average of 7 slides then went to autoplay

1 went to the thumbnails, looked at a few, then clicked on numbers

1 clicked on numbers

Of the 8 that started with the Numbers

7 clicked through the Numbers the entire time

1 went to “autoplay” after clicking on five numbers

Number of slides viewed

The average number of the 40 slides in the package viewed by those who used one method the whole time:

Next – 28 (70%)

Arrow – 25 (62%)

Numbers – 12 (30%)

Nine of the 34 participants viewed all 40 of the slides – all of them started with the “next” method of navigating the slides. Seven of those nine used “next” the whole time, the other two went to “autoplay” to view the rest of the stack.

For all the participants – the average number of slides viewed was 23.

Time spent

The average time spent with the slide show package was 2:55. The longest time was 8:17 (a young woman of Hispanic background – carefully read all the slide information). The shortest was 0:48. With these outliers removed, the average time spent was 2:49.

For people who stayed with one method, here’s the amount of time they spent with the slides:

Next – 2:34

Arrow – 3:31

Numbers – 2:16

Linearity

One of the possibilities in designing online presentation is the option of moving through material linearly or non-linearly. Two of the navigation options facilitated non-linear exploration of the material – the “numbers” and the “thumbnails.” No one started with the “thumbnails” and of the eight who started with the “numbers” half of them clicked the numbers in order (linearly), the other half clicked around in random order. Of the half that clicked linearly, the average number of slides viewed was 20.75. Of the half that clicked randomly, the average number of slides viewed was only 6.5.

Reading

We viewed all the eyetrack recordings to see whether the participant read the related text about each slide.

Eleven (33%) of the participants carefully read the slide text

Sixteen (47%) skimmed or read the text sporadically

Seven (20%) did not look at the slide captions

There was no predominant method of viewing the slides that resulted in a more careful reading of the text. Of the eleven seen as carefully reading the text, 4 used the “number”, 3 used the “next”, 3 used the “arrow”, and one used “autoplay”

Observations

In terms of practical advice, this observation of navigational methods use makes clear that if you can only have one navigation method – the “next” method, moving linearly through the set of slides is the one to use. It was the primary choice of the majority of the participants and resulted in viewing the most slides.

However, if amount of time spent with the story package is your primary goal, people who clicked from slide to slide using the “arrow” spent almost a minute longer than the “next” users.

The reason for some of the other observations (for example, why no one selected the “thumbnail” view as an initial navigation method and why so few (2) selected autoplay) is not known – we did not ask people about their choices (or about their possible confusion about the choices.) This would be an interesting project for a future time – to do more of a “think aloud” session about people’s navigational choices. But this observational study does provide some insights into the choices made by people faced with a variety of methods for navigating to through rich and deep slide shows.

But perhaps the most interesting observation was the very low level usage of the non-linear approach (and when it was used, how few slides were observed.) Is the linear orientation to looking through material so hard-wired into our media usage that it is, and will continue to be, the preferred way to take in media? Even when it was visual information – as this was – and did not logically need to follow a narrative thread – people preferred to move through in the order it was presented. What does this observation tell us about innovation in digital storytelling and our audience’s tolerance for new design paradigms.

Early lessons from Poynter's Eyetrack07

Nora Paul — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 14:05:08 +0000

The Poynter Institute has a long tradition of doing ground-breaking research. The latest is Eyetrack07, the fourth of their eyetracking projects over the past 16 years. They went to four cities (Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and St. Petersburg) to look at the patterns of reading in broadsheet, tabloid, and on- screen publications. In all, 600 participants (200 for each of the media) were tested.

On April 10-12, the Poynter Institute held a conference – “EyeTrack07 – Discover Its Power” – billed as a pre-publication party (the book of findings is being edited by Dr. Pegie Stark Adam and is due out in June). Attendees included the vast team involved in the project, the news organizations that collaborated with them, and editors, researchers, and media consultants who hoped to find actionable insights from the findings.

In the opening speech veteran news designer Mario Garcia presented a timeline of Poynter’s research work in the areas of design and reading patterns.

The first, in 1990, used eyetracking equipment to see how people’s eyes moved around the printed news page. The key findings from this study included:

Readers enter a printed page thru the largest image on the page.

A majority read the headline before going to the text.

Photo captions were the third most frequently visited part of the page.
These findings influenced newspapers’ use of photos on front pages and the understanding of how important clever headline writing is.

The second, in 2000, focused on how people moved through news websites and found that, unlike with print, online readers entered the page through text and headlines – not images. This showed, as Dr. Garcia told the group, how the Web was more like a book in which people want their text in a flow uninterrupted by images. The rise of the photo slideshow was a response to this.

The third, in 2004, further focused on online reading behavior. The study (conducted by co-columnist Laura Ruel with Steve Outing) used less invasive eyetracking equipment and relied on mocked up news pages to test different aspects of the online reading experience. Key findings from this study included:

Dominant heds most often draw the users eye first when entering the screen

Eyes fixated first in the upper left corner of the page.

Top navigation was most readily seen and used.

Shorter paragraphs were read more than longer ones.

Ads in the upper left and the top of the homepage received the most attention.
Actionable advice from this study included the need for attention-grabbing words at the start of headlines, greater use of “chunking” text into short grafs, and the preference for one column formats for stories rather than multi-columns.

What this study showed, too, was that larger font text was quickly scanned and smaller fonts engaged in depth reading. It was clear that reading was being done online.

And that brings us to the latest Poynter eyetrack study – an attempt to discover differences in reading patterns between different media and formats of news presentation – broadsheet, tabloid, and online.

The research team drew up a set of issues they hoped to have the project address:
1. Have we lost our ability to read in depth?
2. Are we a society of scanners?
3. Has the newspaper habit disappeared from most people’s lives?
4. In a multimedia society how can the various media compete and survive?
5. Can a real fusion of online and print truly exist?
6. Do readers actually read and retain info online?
7. Are large formatted papers more likely to disappear than small format?
8. What is the role of advertising in a multi-platform environment?
9. What is the new definition of news?
10. What role will mobile appliances play in newsgathering and disseminating?

In 600 research sessions, they recorded participants’ eye movements as they looked through one of the three media formats, resulting in more than 102,000 “eye stops” (demonstration of significant interest in the element of the page / screen being looked at) which were coded and analyzed by researchers at the University of Florida. In all, over the course of five months, 30 days of published material was recorded:

2,364 broadsheet stories (average no. of stories read – 11.8)

2,188 tabloid stories (average no. of stories read – 10,0)

2,306 online stories (average no. of stories read – 11.9)

In the major findings revealed in the opening day of the session, a few of these questions were apparently addressed. Here are some of the conclusions from the research that are particularly relevant to online news reading in comparison to print reading behavior.

Reading thoroughness:

Once people chose what they wanted to read they read more thoroughly online than in print.

Online readers read both short and long stories more completely than either broadsheet or tabloid readers (online 62% of the text of stories longer than 19 inches was read compared to 52% in tabloid and 49% in broadsheet.)

Online readers, overall, read an average of 77% of the stories they chose to read.
Implication? Can we get over the longing for the “good old days” when supposedly people sat and read the newspaper cover to cover? It is clear that once engaged, the online reader stays with the text of a story longer than the newsprint reader. What might this mean for online news design. Does this, for example, argue for the placement of supplemental links 3/4ths of the way down the news story since interested readers seem to get that far?

Reading styles:

There were two reading styles revealed in the research – methodical readers and scanners. The “methodical” reader is described as someone who reads from top to bottom, without scanning, moving down the page / screen and sometimes going back to re-read material. The “scanner” would move quickly from headline to photos to reading part of a story without going back to the same place in the text. The eyetracking showed:

75% of print readers were methodical.

Online readers were evenly split between methodical and scanners.
Implication? In the newsprint world one size, by necessity, fits all – and a majority of readers have developed a habit of newspaper reading fits the medium. Not so online. One of the ongoing challenges for online news design is accommodating readers with different levels of interest – how do you provide both the quick hit news and in-depth content. Now, knowing that the audience is split between two different types of readers, how can online news be designed to engage both types of behaviors. Would it be a reader service to provide alternative second level story pages – one designed in regular column format with few graphic distractions for the methodical reader and one with multiple story sets with images and graphics to facilitate scanning behavior?

Reading entry points:

The first stop and second stop points, those places where the eye initially and secondarily fixated, differed by medium:

Broadsheet: Headlines then photos

Tabloid: Photos then teasers (directionals)

Online: Navigation bar / teasesrs (directionals) then headlines or ads
Implication? Giving online readers guidance to where content can be found and featuring / teasing to stories you want to showcase will get their attention. Headlines guide readers to those stories they might be interested in and, once they are interested, those stories will be read quite thoroughly. There is much more to be studied about how this finding might help lead readers to stories that fulfill that “need to know” mission of the news organization.

How graphics were viewed:

Different graphic elements drew the attention of different media readers:

Broadsheet: Explanatory graphics drew the most “eye stops.”

Tabloid: Charts were most frequently viewed.

Online: 88% of the eye stops on graphics went to maps, including weather and traffic.
Implication? The Web is a learner’s medium. Maps provide specific, actionable information, particularly when it is constantly refreshed with the latest information (as with weather or traffic.) This also might argue for greater attention to the use of mash-ups as a way to display geo-specific information and reference.

What got looked at online?

The eye stops data from the online readers was analyzed to see what content elements were most frequently fixated on by users. Here is the heartening, or depressing, statistics on what, out of 11,400 eye stops, got viewed:

Story lists: 35%

Teasers / directionals: 27%

Ads: 18%

Blogs: 4%

Photo galleries: 3%

Podcasts: 1%
Implications? Segmenting content by its form (photo gallery, blog, podcast) rather than by its subject content may well be marginalizing.

Interesting future research might look at how packaging relevant alternative material with key related news stories improves the use of this supplemental information as the Washington Post does with its sidebar links to a collection of relevant photos or to “Who’s Blogging?” that specific article.

These are just some of the preliminary findings from what promises to be a deep and much discussed research project. Project leaders Sarah Quinn and Pegie Stark Adam have provided online news designers and those interested in deeper research into what works, and why, online with a rich vein of data and I, for one, am looking forward to the final report of findings. If you are, too, information can be found at http://eyetrack.poynter.org/.

News site Web design: What works? What doesn't?

Nora Paul — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 13:16:19 +0000

[Editor's note: Today OJR welcomes Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota and Laura Ruel of the University of North Carolina as contributing writers on the site. Each month, Nora and Laura will examine current research on news website user interfaces and storytelling techniques. Their articles will help news site producers and editors pick the best ways to package their information to increase their site's traffic and influence.]

Goodbye 2006. The tenth anniversary year of the start of many Web-based news sites was the occasion for reflection about how far (or not) we’ve come and speculation on how best to proceed forward. Here we are in 2007 and it’s time to do a measured look at where we are right now.

For the past ten years the features on news websites have evolved and expanded. Thanks to software developments like SoundSlides audio slideshows have proliferated on news sites, expanding experimentation with ”multimedia.” The “We Media” mantra has given rise to collaborative community reported news both within and outside mainstream news organizations. RSS feeds have changed the notion of mass product distribution to personalized news channel delivery. The aggregation of news stories on a given topic coupled with additional information (along the lines of Seattle P-I’s Transportation page or Lawrence Journal-World’s Legislation page) is moving news websites away from “your daily newspaper on the computer screen” to a valuable aggregation of community information.

Experimentation with individual story forms continues. The slideshow is getting a remake with the “flipbook” style of choreographed image display set to music (as with the MSNBC “Iraqi Kurdistan” video.) The packaging of series stories with multiple media elements is getting cleaner and more elegantly designed (the Orphans & Angels piece from Florida Today is a good example.) Flash and Google maps interfaces are being used to navigate the user through data and information (take a look at AZ Star’s Sealing Our Border interactive map and the Boston Globe campaign contributions map.)

How the success of these experimentations and evolutions are being measured is still an issue. Page views, time spent on the page, where people enter in from and where they go after can all be measured. But what do we know about how these news features and forms change attitude toward the news product, or how effective the form is at informing, or if a new design is a more effective way to get people to engage fully with the carefully constructed package?

Research into story design effectiveness is happening in newsrooms and universities. In the case of newsroom research, the findings are regarded as competitive intelligence and not readily shared with the industry. In universities, the findings are written in academese and not readily understood by the industry.

In this column, we will ferret out the research and findings about story form effectiveness and profile the people and places who are trying to understand current practices and guide more informed design decisions. Creating stories that engage, inform, and get people to come back for more must be part of the media’s mix of offerings. We hope, in the coming months, to engage and inform you about story design research.

(Special thanks to Interactive Narratives for consistently shining a light on story innovation.)

'New News' retrospective: Is online news reaching its potential?

Nora Paul — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 11:23:18 +0000

Ten years ago, at the first “New News” seminar held at the Poynter Institute, a group of digital pioneers brainstormed what would be new about online news. They listed what it was that newspapers were not providing that the new digital news space would enable and how the new medium might change news reporting and writing.

Many of the predictions were based on the idea of the “limitless newshole,” an endless space for providing deep context and satisfying the “give me more” that reporters thought news seekers were craving. The promise of hyperlinking and easier communication between readers and reporters were all high on the list of ways this new news space would change news. Creating new expressive forms of reporting, providing better follow-up on reported stories and crafting new relationships between words and graphics were noted as new potentials for online news.

Ten years later, just how far have we come in realizing these predictions? How much have we truly leveraged the possibilities of new forms of news writing and reporting online?

Limitless newshole

The Promise: In the early days of online news it seemed that its greatest attraction would be online availability of all the information reporters gathered but couldn’t fit into available print column inches.

The Reality: Online news is still a downstream product. For the most part, the news text comes to the screen after it has been edited for the print – and that means that the “extra” reporting has been edited out already, although there are sometimes exceptions in newspapers’ news sites.

As Dennis Buster, news editor at Minneapolis-St. Paul’s startribune.com, commented, “Here at the Strib … I haven’t found that it’s a regular practice to insert into Web stories the stuff that was taken out for the newspaper version. But it does happen occasionally. Where I am most aware of it is in reviews, where it seems to happen most often (though it’s still far from an ‘often” occurrence). A late review comes in and has to be trimmed into a hole that has been left for it in the paper. The reviewer has quite a bit of other good stuff that would be beneficial for readers to have access to, so we sometimes get a request that night or the next morning from our features folks to run a longer version of that story. It has happened a few times with sports stories and metro stories, but that has been a VERY rare happening, in my experience.”

More frequently, this bottomless newshole is being used as an endless news stream for television station video reports. Teresa Moore, executive producer of Web content for WTSP-TV Tampa Bay’s 10, reported: “We stream unedited videos along with stories that ran on our air with shorter soundbites. For example, we’ll post whole interviews online or show whole press conferences live that won’t make it on air. When our reporters do live shots for air – we stream them online and keep them talking about stuff they couldn’t cram into 1:30. You can see this in action, go to http://www.tampabays10.com/news/live.asp and you’ll see reporters come and go around show times. This is still in the beta phase. We’re getting ready to roll some more production behind this. We’re going to brand it – but right now we affectionately call it ‘tampabays10 unplugged’ – like VH1.”

Give me more

The Promise: People hungry for context and comprehensiveness would clamor for everything you could package together. The Web would be where people went when they wanted deep content and they would be looking to their news organization to give it to them.

The Reality: The Web has become an alert service, the place for time-starved but news-hungry consumers. As Rusty Coats, formerly of Mori Research cautioned, “Don’t market your site by saying we’ll give you more. People don’t have enough time now. They don’t want more, they want efficiency. How will your site make their life easier?”

When news seekers want comprehensive, in-depth coverage they find it themselves through news site hopping. News aggregators like Google News facilitate this. Are you really interested in Bernard Ebbers’ conviction for WorldCom fraud? Google has pulled together links to 1300+ news stories for you.

Where news sites are taking advantage of the “give me more” nature of the Web is with the packaging of related source materials. Now you can read the transcript or hear the full speech or see the video from the event – these media elements enhance the text story package and provide a sensory “give me more” that was impossible to do with newsprint.

Another problem realizing the potential of the Web for deep reporting on any particular topic is that there are fewer and fewer newsroom resources available for original, in-depth reporting. Look at most online news sites – what percent of the coverage is wire copy? Pack news judgment reigns in most news organizations. No wonder there has been a rise in niche news sites, bloggers who consult esoteric sources and discussion areas where people intensely interested in particular topics can get more and different news than they will from their still geo-focused local newspaper.

Hyperlinking

The Promise: Hyperlinking was going to be the biggest enhancement to online news. Through links, news producers would be able to send their news audience to related stories on their own site, to important stories offsite and to essential Web sites where more information could be found. This Web of news would provide greater context and allow for news consumers to find in one spot all the information of interest related to the story they are reading.

The Reality: The promise of linking hit the reality of production. Few news sites regularly link to outside Web sites because 1) it takes time to find and verify the authenticity of the sites you send your customers to and 2) who wants to send customers off to another site? As for linking to related stories within the news site, this is more common, but not nearly as routine as it should be. (A recent check of the New York Times Online front pages stories showed no stories with external links and internal links only to “Most E-mailed Stories,” “top articles” or “related stories” – most of which required a payment of $2.95 in order to read.)

The issue is one of time, but also of information management and the packaging of ongoing news coverage. Some news sites have taken routinely covered topics in their region and made them into “story shells” (a term coined by Jane Ellen Stevens – see related OJR story) where current stories sit on top of the other coverage. This requires a rethinking of news divisions on sites that, for the most part, mimic the newsprint sections and a determination of which areas will have ongoing coverage. A micro-site would be designed to hold all the relevant material (more about this below in “Follow-up on stories.”)

Communication between reporter and reader

The Promise: No longer would communication with readers be “us to them” — now we would have two-way communication. This new communication paradigm would democratize news, making the reader the correspondent, inviting in their stories and viewpoints. It would also help inform reporters about the readers’ real world interests and concerns.

The Reality: nytimes.com does, but washingtonpost.com doesn’t. USATODAY.com doesn’t, startribune.com does. Having bylines linked to e-mail for their reporters is not at all the common practice that was promised, in the early days, as one of the great benefits of online reporting.

Reporters who do make their e-mail addresses available find that this is a powerful way to stay in touch with their readers, to get story tips and to tap into the expertise of their audience. But others still consider it to be a potential time suck and would just as soon keep the communication flow going one way. As for facilitating communication between readers through forums and chat areas online, these continue to be conversational cul-de-sacs, for the most part – dead-ending in the forum. They are not being read by reporters who could use them to cull interesting ideas and people.

Blogs promise to bring in a new wave of communication linkage between reporters and their audiences. Dan Gillmor’s famous statement that “my readers know more than I do” honors this idea that a dialogue rather than a lecture will lead to richer reporting. The Weblog form (see “New expressive reporting styles” below) has hit mainstream newsrooms from the sports desk, to business, to political columnists. But many of them, like Daniel Weintraub’s California Insider, for example,
(user registration required) don’t have comments links – so they are still just one way communications, a new form, yes, but same old flow out only.

The harshest reality that news organizations have to face is that readers are finding each other, cutting out the “middle man.” The lackluster support and catchall nature of news sites’ forum areas have sent most dedicated posters to sites where the community they are seeking is much richer and livelier. Disease sufferers, tropical plant growers, music fans, political polemicists, tree-huggers, and do-it-yourselfers have all found places for conversation, advice, and support — and it isn’t the news site. It has been said that the role of the newspaper is to get a community into conversation with itself. Well, the newspaper’s hoped-for role has been abdicated to any number of online discussion areas.

How I wrote the story

The Promise: This abundant newshole we talked about earlier would also make it possible for news organizations to provide some transparency in their reporting. Reporters would let readers behind the scenes to hear how the news was gathered. Much like the trend that was happening in investigative reporting when the methods for data gathering and analysis became interesting sidebar material, it was felt that the online news space would allow reporters to let people into the news process.

The Reality: Multimedia has helped to make this promise a reality in a lot of online news packages. The growing practice of creating slide shows with audio overlays about the pictures that are being seen, and the story behind them, is bringing a conversational, insider tone to news reports. In some cases it is the photographer who is telling the story behind the pictures, other times it is the reporter telling the story. A mix can be seen at the New York Times Multimedia page. This type of story, often supplementing the regular text style report, brings a more human side to news coverage and lets people feel more involved in the process.

New expressive reporting styles

The Promise: Online reporting would allow reporters to have a new news vernacular, more informal. They would be able to tell stories in new, non-linear ways. The pyramid style report could be blown up.

The Reality: As noted before, most online news content continues to be the same news text from offline displayed online. The same reporting forms. The same AP style. But there are sections of the news site that have supported new expressive forms: blog columns and forums. The blog format being used by some columnists and reporters provides a much more conversational approach to the news, the sort of insider dialogue between cohorts that makes the blog such an appealing form. This more informal style of writing and the openness to sharing of ideas that blogs represent are important steps towards realizing the early promise of new reporting styles. In addition, reading forum areas on news sites certainly takes people away from newspeak into the vernacular.

Follow-up on stories

The Promise: Newsprint reporting is, of necessity, episodic and short-lived. Online reports can be encyclopedic and have a long shelf-life. This was the great promise of the online news site – its archival potential could create evolving news reporting that could keep developments in short-term and longer-range news stories up-to-date.

The Reality: Some news sites are using the archival nature of the Web to create ongoing coverage sites of important news topics. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Traffic site and the Lawrence Journal-World’s Legislature site with its cumulative coverage of legislative issues are good examples of this use of the Web. Even updating individual stories is being done. The Orange Country Register’s “Toxic Treats” series offers updates about more recalls or state-wide actions to curb the distribution of these dangerous candies.

New relationships between words and graphics

The Promise: New storytelling software that would make the merging of words and images easier would change the way stories were packaged and presented.

The Reality: The interest in using Flash and other multimedia software for creating new story forms is growing. News sites from organizations of almost every size are playing with animated slide shows and experimenting with new presentations of news. Multimedia stories with images, sounds, and text (as opposed to multiple media packaging where the various media elements sit next to each other rather than being integrated) are being crafted. The reality, though, is that the time it takes to break out of column inch display of news text into new story forms is time that is hard to find.

People often object to the term “new media” – look, it’s been around for at least a decade. But if you look closely you’ll see that the great promise that was seen for this as a new form of journalism has yet to be fully realized. New methods for crafting and delivering compelling news stories online are still a long way from being fully developed.