Main Story: ? It's Time to Make the Web an Equal Partner Sidebars: ? Multiple Ways to Interact ? A Means to More Insight The Web is a user-driven medium where users feel that they have to move around and click on things ... People want to feel that they are active when they are on the Web. -- 'Designing Web Usability,' Jakob Nielsen

On The Web, the visitor controls the story. And as navigator, every reader also in some fashion becomes narrator. Stories don't start somewhere and end somewhere. They start where each visitor wants to start and end when and where each visitor wants to end.

There's no escaping it. In the end, the medium will demand new ways of telling stories, not merely designing them. But better design can help a bit. And new means of storytelling don't, in my view, mean the death of narrative forms online.

Three members in The Times project team independently told me they couldn't read the series online. Given this remarkable admission, I have trouble understanding why NYTimes.com carefully avoided any significant design changes from how the series appeared in print.

Designing the series

Sure, a few pictures were added. But Meredith Artley, NYTimes.com's associate editor, said she'd rejected efforts to break up the series by pages (an increasingly common practice at such Web sites as www.salon.com ) or to add more subheads than had appeared in the print version. I think both would have helped me a bit as I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, scanning more often than reading. I'd also have liked to stop and catch my breath, clicking on a series of audio buttons that might have been linked to pictures of the two or three key characters in each story. On these audio clips, reporters could have recorded telling scenes that they witnessed over months of observation and reporting. Or they might have encouraged their characters to talk about a childhood memory of race.

By placing such audio buttons at a natural break in the narrative, designers could have enhanced rather than detracted from the print story.

Getting such audio will first require a cultural change in newsrooms -- one that's past due given the rapidly changing interests of audience. Print reporters either will need to carry recorders themselves or agree to be accompanied by a multimedia reporter from the Web.

Toward new forms of narrative

Within a few years, I suspect, such modest cultural changes will be viewed as little more than icing. The Web allows readers to decide the order in which they view words, pictures and sound on any site. This clearly will dictate finding other means of telling stories than blocks of type, multiple thousands of words long.

Information that is layered, broken into short self-contained text blocks and interspersed with audio and video clips, graphics and maps already can be found across the Web, most recently at sites devoted to this year's presidential election. But topics such as politics lend themselves well to the Web. Editors can break election races into bite-sized chunks such as the bio boxes, issues boxes, voting records, ad boxes, sound bites, notebooks and other discreet pieces of information.

For those wedded to narrative forms, change will be harder. I'd propose starting with the concept of an online 'table of contents' for long stories. This, of course, would require that these stories be written in something akin to chapters, shorter blocks of type, perhaps set off by design breaks such as hollow boxes.

Each chapter should begin with a hook and end leaving the reader hanging. Elmore Leonard understands. The author, whose books convert easily to the movie screen, is a master of pace. His low-life characters careen toward each other in terse chapters that hook readers in the first few words and leave them wondering what comes next. Similar, self-contained 'chapters' on the printed page, can more easily be converted to the Web.

Creating a hyperlinked Web table of contents for longer print stories serves several purposes.

It breaks stories into sections. It tells readers what's coming when (and, if designers want to include it, in how many words). It lets readers plan their time.

In the end, I suspect such design and story organization would entice more web readers to stay with narratives from start to finish.

I know. It's a lot easier to theorize about nonlinear structures or new linear structures than to pull them off. But it's time for more of us to risk criticism and try.

'I think one thing everybody acknowledges is that people don't like to read long stories on the Web,' said Amy Harmon, a Times technology reporter who told the story of two Atlanta entrepreneurs, one white, one black. ' And these were really long stories.'