From the Interactive Media Conference: Why Writing Still Matters

I suspect that the only folks who question whether writing matters online are those who will not extend their definition of writing to include anything beyond traditional, newspaper-style narratives. The Internet has spawned at least three other distinct writing formats that attract and inform millions of eager readers every day. In addition it has helped engage the audience by crushing the wall that has separated readers from writers in print media.

With millions of readers becoming writers online, the number of voices available to the reading public online now dwarfs the number of writers working in print. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for professional writers. First, the challenge: we have much, much more competition for readers' attention than ever before. Some critics make the mistake of insisting that the modern audience suffers from stunted attention spans. I reject that hypothesis.

Next month, hundreds of thousands of children across this country will run to bookstores, buy a 672-page book, take it home and read it cover-to-cover, staying up through the night to finish it in many cases. After that, many of those readers will go online, writing their own dispatches to discuss, analyze or just to share the collective experience of having read this book. The Harry Potter generation has no problem with attention span. It does have a problem wasting its time on media that fails to engage it. We no longer live in a world of two daily newspapers, three TV networks and a dozen radio stations. What some misread as poor attention span is more accurately, in my view, explained as a public trying to shift through millions of media options in the same 24 hours of a day.

And there is our opportunity. To survive with an audience large enough to make your publication economically viable, you've got to be good. Fortunately for many of us in this room, we are. So why should we hide our work in a medium and in a narrative form that so many readers are moving away from, when we could expand our readership by publishing in new online narrative forms?

Most readers won't skim the wire copy, lightly reported features and overreported thumbsuckers that comprise too many U.S. daily newspapers. But many of them will devote hours a day reading niche discussion boards online, enduring some of the painful user interfaces ever devised. What draws them is the writing. Not the grammar, the syntax or the pyramid form. Rather, they crave genuine voices who provide clear, wanted information not available elsewhere.

With new voices come new formats, as well. In addition to articles, online readers can chose from among three major new online forms: discussions, blogs and wikis. (I'm not including chat or e-mail as major new forms, since such a small percentage of the writing in those formats attracts readers who are not active participants in those conversations.)

So who's writing well online in these formats? Here are four typical examples of good work I've been reading during the past few months.

Paul Shirley is the 12th man on the Phoenix Suns professional basketball team. His blog on the Suns' website follows a classical journalism tradition of blending an outsider's point of view with an insider's access. As the 12th man, Shirley never gets off the bench during a competitive game. And, frankly, as a white, Midwestern college graduate, he has more in common demographically with the fans in the stands than with his teammates. But he is part of the team, a participant in its practices, warm-up drills, time-outs and plane trips, which he retells to his readers in vivid, often hilarious detail.

Not all Web writing need be frivolous. Josh Marshall reports on Washington politics on TalkingPointsMemo.com, advancing reporting on issues as often as he reacts to others' reporting. He has now expanded the site, embracing interactive writing forms, with TPMCafe.com, a collection of guest and group blogs and discussions. Media critic Eric Alterman called TPMCafe the future of the punditocracy, and I agree.

BoingBoing.net provides an engaging and literate group blog chronicling the more quirky and provocative news of the day. It illustrates how a small group of talented writers can engage a massive audience on a meager budget.

Finally, one of the more compelling examples of interactive writing online came last fall from a sports fan website. Members of the SonsofSamHorn, a Red Sox discussion board, started a thread called ?Win It For...? listing some of the deserving Sox players who never got the chance to win a World Series championship. Other readers responded with sometimes heart-wrenching stories of grandparents, parents, siblings, spouses and even children who has passionately followed the team, yet died before seeing their beloved Sox win the title.

This spring, ?Win It For...? was republished as a book, the first example I know of an Internet discussion thread being republished in book form. Yes, print/online synergy works for online publishers as well.

Experienced, professional writers can help further develop these forms, and serve their readers, by embracing these new forms and breaking out of their narrative rut. Our readers have. Now, we need to first follow them into new formats if we want to ever back out in front to lead them again.