When to hyperlink within an online news story?

April 11, 2011 By 7 Comments

When to hyperlink within an online news story?

That’s a question that challenges even the most experienced online writers. Hyperlinks imbue a news story with the power of the World Wide Web, allowing writers to source information, explain detail and provide depth in ways unique to the medium.

Hyperlinks also allow writers to clutter stories, and to distract and mislead readers away from the narrative of the piece. No wonder that many writers ignore hyperlinks, leaving them to automated scripts in the site’s content management system, or a lame list of (sort of, maybe) “related links” at a post’s end, selected by an online editor who wasn’t included in the process until the very end.

Professor Ronald Yaros of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism has completed a study that offers online journalists and educators a bit of needed guidance on when, and when not, to use hyperlinks in a news story.

Yaros’ study tested two versions of New York Times stories: an original version, written in traditional “inverted pyramid” style, and a rewritten version in which background and explanatory information appeared much earlier. In each version, Yaros tested whether reader comprehension improved by using traditional links to related websites, or by linking technical terms instead to explanatory text that opened in smaller windows.

The explainer stories with the links to explanatory text did best. But the explanatory links didn’t perform so well in the traditional, inverted pyramid version of the story. In that version, the one with the traditional links performed better.

In other words, the type of story you are writing should influence your linking strategy.

I asked Yaros about the practical implications of this research, via e-mail.

Niles: How does a journalist decide when a story merits these types of explanatory links?

Yaros: The first question is whether the content is simple or complex for a general audience to understand? For example, does one need at least one high school course to understand this topic? Communicators have always had to impute audience knowledge, estimating what audiences know and understand. If a digital story is complex, such as news about Japan’s nuclear reactors, explanatory narrative text should be strategically combined with specific explanatory links to communicate one coherent story. That decision needs to made at the outset, not after the text is already written.

Niles: How would you suggest people incorporate this?

Yaros: When beginning a story, students need to envision multimedia, not just text. “Related” graphics, links, video, polls, and animations are not as effective when added to text later, or if they are treated as a separate “explainer.” A coherent multimedia story – like a traditional newspaper story – must be coherent to maximize a user’s engagement and comprehension.

Niles: So there is still an effective place for “traditional” linking to outside websites within news stories?

Yaros: Yes. The results from my study showed that traditional “inverted pyramid” stories about issues most users understand communicate better with “traditional” linking to outside websites. In fact, users comprehended LESS content when explanatory links were combined with the inverted pyramid (compared to an explanatory narrative).

Niles: What drew you to this topic?

Yaros: I worked in broadcast journalism for about 10 years followed by another 10 running an educational software company. When it became obvious to me in the 1990s that we were entering a new world of how information is produced, shared and consumed, I was convinced then – as I am today – that more applied research is needed if we are to anticipate changes in how future news audiences will engage with multimedia and mobile devices. Instead of keeping up with today’s newest tools, my research tries to identify trends that predict how improved video and faster speeds in the future – using new products, such as the iPhone5, iPad3, 4GS network and social tools – will influence a savvy multitasking audience.

Since beginning my Ph.D. program in 2000, the mission has been to research how audiences learn from multiple platforms. My work commenced by applying and testing the traditional ways people comprehended text then building on that foundation for the web by adding photos, video, audio, links, etc. The outcome is the “P-I-C-K News” model that simultaneously combines: (1) personalized content, (2) interactivity, such as different types of links, and (3) coherence in multiple media with (4) minimal “kick outs” (or things that terminate one’s interest in content).

Niles: What about additional research on this topic?

Yaros: The “crisscross” pattern in the results show that linear explanatory links were best with linear explanatory texts, and traditional links to other websites were more effective with the inverted pyramid. What we don’t yet know is why. My guess is that when a user encounters a news story, he or she immediately employs a particular comprehension strategy because they sense what will be needed to understand it. That’s only a guess at this point.

* * *

What strategy do you use (if any) to decide when to place hyperlinks within your posts? I’d love to hear your advice to other journalists, in the comments.

Filed Under: Frontpage Tagged With: ,

Curation questions and the start of some answers

February 6, 2011 By 3 Comments

Information curation, like data visualization, is one of the buzzwords being used by those trying to guide, and goad, news organizations into thinking about new content models. Jeff Jarvis talks about “curation” as the activities of sorting, choosing, and display.

Mike Shatzkin on the Idea Logical blog said

“Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition. But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them. Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helpful. Curation creates the brand.”

There have been some forays into news site curation. LJWorld created a Kansas Legislature page in 2005 that aggregated links to general news coverage of the state Legislature. But they took the next step of selecting and organizing stories by specific issues like Death Penalty, Concealed Weapons and Sunday Liquor Sales. The page served as a “one-stop shopping” resource by anticipating the kinds of information someone interested in the Legislature might want by including such resources as bios of legislators, legislative calendars and bill finders, and copies of the State of the Union addresses going back several years. LJWorld still has an aggregated page of Legislative coverage, but it is not longer curated – it is just a list of links to news stories.

Losing the topic focus switched the LJWorld’s page from curation to aggregation because an essential step in curation is organization, as they did with the issues, not just listing. Just as a well-curated museum has the Early Asian art area separate from the Surrealist collection, so should news sites provide some subject organization within large news topics.

Curation can also entail finding and providing resources from all over, not just aggregating your own content.

The New York Times Topic Pages are an example of this kind of curation. They have thousands of subject / event / personality specific pages which provide an overview article on the topic, links to all the NYT past coverage (with a searchable database specific to those articles), and, here’s where the curation comes in, sections on “Headlines from around the web” (a listing of articles found using the NYTimes’ news aggregation program Blogrunner which has been sent to selected sites) and “A list of resources from around the Web as selected by researchers and editors of The New York Times.”

We were interested in observing how this kind of curated content was used by people on an information seeking quest. We conducted eyetracking sessions with 37 undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota. The students were told that they were going to write a research report for a class and were given a selection of 10 New York Times Topic Pages from which they could choose the topic of their report: the U.S. Dollar, Earthquakes, the U.S. Federal Budget, Foreclosures, Mortgages and the Markets, Piracy at Sea, Stem Cells, Tornadoes, and Unemployment.

The students sat at a Tobii Technology eye tracking device in our research lab and were told to go to the Topic page of their choice and do whatever they wanted (read, click). After 10 minutes we stopped the session. All of the participants answered a short online questionnaire about the website and their information seeking experience after their eye tracking session.

In analyzing the eyetrack videos we designated each section of the Topic Pages (e.g., “Summary,” “Multimedia,” “Navigator,” etc.) and we coded the participant’s “attention” on the page using a construct describing the “Path to a Click” by researchers at Yahoo which characterizes activity on a site by the frequency and duration of a person’s attention to a particular part of the page. These levels are:

  1. Saw: when the participant’s gaze passed across a section
  2. Noticed: when a section the participant “saw,” then glanced away from, was returned to
  3. Parsed: when the participant “fixated” on a section, clearly taking in the text / image

Other things we analyzed in reviewing the videos were:

  • the sections that contained URLs that were clicked by the participants to figure out whether the placement of the content influenced their clicking behaviors
  • the content of the items that were clicked (headline only, headline plus abstract, headline plus image, etc.)

Among the findings are the following:

ATTENTION TO DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE PAGE. The percent indicates the number of participants.

  • Most parsed sections (areas where most attention and time was spent)
    • Summary (100%)
    • Articles about (70.4%)
    • Multimedia (58%)
  • Most unparsed sections (virtually no attention paid)
    • top-right search box and top global navigation (both 97.4%)
    • Related Topics (83.3%)
    • left-column advertisement (80.3%)
  • Zones in which the most links were clicked: (based on a 3×3 grid placed on the Topic Page)
    • left column middle row
    • middle column top row
    • left column bottom row
  • Statistically, contents in the left column were seen, parsed, and clicked the most (Note: the left column was where the archived stories were displayed)

WHAT WAS CLICKED
Among the 37 students, a total of 138 items were clicked (an average of 3.7 clicks per participant) Of those items that were clicked:

  • 42% were headline only
  • 24.6% were a headline and story abstract
  • 14.4% were a headline, abstract and photo

Of all the items clicked 85.5% were story links. Of the other items clicked, 65% of them were from the “Related Topics” box.

In the post-eyetracking survey, participants were asked a number of questions about the features of the page and their importance to them.

  • 72% of the participants rated the Navigator (links to other websites) as Useful or Very Useful. Very Useful or Useful ratings of the other key areas of content on the page: Articles from the archive (67%), Headlines from around the Web (59%), Overview of the topic (64%).
  • Of the existing or potential functions on the page that could aid a researcher, the following is the ranking by those considered “somewhat important” or “very important”:
    • 100% Bookmark or save an article (81% said “very important”)
    • 70% See article ratings from others
    • 64% Rate an article
    • 56% Sort articles by your rating
  • When asked what it was about an item they clicked on that prompted them to click (multiple responses were possible):
    • 81% cited information in the headline
    • 27% cited a photo
    • 21% cited information the abstract
  • The preference for display of stories is, by far, most recent to oldest. Articles rated highest by others or most read / emailed articles about the topic was preferred over oldest to most recent stories.
  • Students indicated their preference for finding information (if they did not access something like the NYTimes topic page) as major search engines (59.4%), the school library website (35,1%), and online encyclopedias (5.5%).
  • Compared to their alternate sources of information, 52.8% of the participants perceived NYT Topic Pages as being equally credible, 37.8% perceived NYT Topic Pages as more credible, and 9.4% perceived NYT Topic Pages as less credible.
  • Compared to their alternate sources of information, 54% perceived the information on the NYT Topic Pages as having about the same level of completeness, 30% saw it as more complete, and 16% saw it as less complete.

Students were asked an open-ended question about what they thought of the organization of the NY Times Topic page they used. Here is an analysis of their comments:

  • 49% mentioned the site was well organized and made it easy to find information
  • 40% mentioned something about the site being busy / visually cluttered
  • 35% mentioned the appealing design of the site

Some of the comments might serve as suggestions for other news sites looking into creating similarly aggregated / curated topic pages:

  • One student said, “Without a search option, it was kind of hard to find an article that would benefit my ‘research paper’ just from looking at headlines.” Of course there was a search option for the story archive, but it is below the scroll towards the bottom of the page and, apparently, easily overlooked.
  • “It was hard to distinguish between articles and opinion pieces.” This should be an important curatorial distinction.
  • “Have a way to mark an article you’ve already read.” A followed link is just a slightly lighter color; maybe clicked story links could be made more distinct or could “grey out” for easy recognition.

Honing “curatorial” skills in news organizations is one area that holds potential for creating high value resources for both casual and more motivated information seekers. However, there remain many questions about how best to design and organize these pages rich in both internal and external information. It is a research area we intend to continue to pursue and we welcome your feedback about this study and suggestions for future studies.

If you would like to see “hot spot” images from the study go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/norapaul/EyetrackingHotSpotsNYTTopicsPageProject#. The areas that are red indicate the longest “fixation”, green the next longest, and yellow after that. Areas of the page with no color were not viewed by the participant.

Filed Under: Frontpage Tagged With: , ,

Are you wasting space on your homepage? How you can learn about your scrolldown rate

January 11, 2011 By 5 Comments

Am I the last website editor on Earth to have found out what scrolldown rate means… and that scrolldown rates are apparently very low… and that this is terrible news for anyone publishing a site?

I don’t know if it was a big techie secret that few if any journalists were let in on, but the light dawned for me when I attended (virtually) a recent webinar put on by my friend Birgit Pauli-Haack, who runs Pauli Systems, LC in Naples, Fla.

Birgit demonstrated it via Google Analytics on two attractive real-life sites. I was jolted, and appalled, to discover that one site had a scrolldown rate of 5 percent, the other 6 percent.

This means that of the readers who call up the first site, only 5 percent bother to scroll down from the first screenful they see.

Too much hard work, apparently, to click that down arrow!

I was petrified to discover what the rate would be on my own site, www.ourblook.com, as we have amassed a tremendous amount of material: 320-plus interviews of academics, journalists, business leaders and top professionals on various issue topics. You have to scroll down or move around the site to see a lot of this.

Our rate turned out to be 16 percent – gratifyingly higher than the samples, but still, this means that just one of six readers on our site scrolls down. Of course I don’t have the faintest idea what the rate would be for other sites, as this is locked into their own Google Analytics codes.

But it also means that our site, and probably lots of other sites, needs a redesign. The lesson I took away is that you have one shot – AND ONLY ONE SHOT – to get prospective readers to read, and that’s by what you offer on the first screenful that pops up when the site gets opened. The more elements (promos or items), the better. We have several elements but a Joomla template I’ve seen has 20. That’s the direction I’d like to go in.

Let’s take a look at Politico, which I think is a terrific news and discussion site. When I call it up as I write this, I see one dominant element with large photo (“GOP finds governing isn’t easy”) and parts of three video buttons. That’s all. When I scroll down another screenful, all of a sudden I see 12 promos, and many of them I’d love to open up. If Politico has a good scrolldown rate, and I hope it does, and maybe it does because its loyal readers would know they have to look around, these stories would be read. But if it has a low scrolldown rate like (I guess) many others, these stories would be largely wasted.

This reminds me of my newspaper days when we poor hacks vaguely were aware that lots of readers stopped reading when a story jumped. We didn’t think this applied to us because our efforts, ha-ha, were so brilliantly written that how could anyone not follow the jump?

Then I became a Gannettoid working in the same headquarters building with (though not for) USA Today, and while it was fashionable for the journalism industry to look down on USAT, if not sneer, in fact it was brilliantly proactive. In a revolutionary move for papers, it limited jumps to one per section front – the so-called cover story – as it attempted to get people to like the product, find it easy to navigate and read more of it.

So now we find ourselves in a similar situation: the people who can’t summon up the effort to follow a jump are the same ones who can’t summon up the effort to scroll down. It’s appalling to me, this lack of desire and effort. I frankly don’t understand it. But it is what it is, and editors who deal with it and try to beat it will probably be better off.

Oh yes, how to find that perhaps humiliating scrolldown rate:

1) Start on your Analytics Report Dashboard,
2) On the left side click on Content,
3) Then click on the expanding sub-navigation In-Page Analytics,
4) And there will be a readout at bottom saying X% clicks below.

P.S. I will respond to any reader comments (even the inevitable ones telling me how dumb I am.)

Gerry Storch is editor and administrator of OurBlook – “blook” meaning a cross between a blog and a book. He was a feature writer with the Detroit News and Miami Herald, Accent section editor and newsroom investigative team leader for the News, and sports editor/business editor for Gannett News Service. He has a B.A. in political science and M.A. in journalism, both from the University of Michigan. This is his third article for OJR.

Filed Under: Frontpage Tagged With:
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »