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On Tuesday, the Associated Press announced a change to its stylebook indicating that its writers should no longer use the term “illegal immigrant” to refer to someone living in a country illegally. The change affects more than just A.P. staffers. Many journalism outlets and independent writers depend on the Associated Press Stylebook to set the standard for terminology and punctuation ethics in the craft.

According to Jim Romenesko, senior vice president and executive editor Kathleen Carroll said that the term “illegal” “should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.”

Carroll said the decision came after extensive discussions including people “from many walks of life,” which caused them to realize their acceptance of “illegal immigrant” was imprecise and not consistent with their standards for other topics like mental health issues, which require writers to use credibly sourced diagnoses instead of labels.

“Will the new guidance make it harder for writers?” Carroll asked. “Perhaps just a bit at first. But while labels may be more facile, they are not accurate.”

First, yesterday we lost access to Jim Romenesko (at least temporarily), thanks to a ham-handed and misguided “investigation” by his bosses at the Poynter Institute.

Poynter Online Director Julie Moos gently scolded Romenesko for “incomplete attribution” in his blog posts on Poynter.org. Which is ridiculous within the context of his blog, which links and excerpts media news stories from around the Web. Moos wrote that Romenesko should have placed quotation marks around the words he was excerpting from the articles he linked, and that would now be Poynter policy for the his and other blogs on Poynter.org.

So Jim quit.

The reason for using quotation marks and attributions on information from sources to clearly identify to readers what information in a story is coming from which sources. Neither I nor hundreds of the readers who took to Twitter, Facebook and blogs to support Romenesko found that a problem with his work. Romenesko helped invent a new format for news reporting online, one that aggregated information from multiple sources and delivered in a way that deviated from traditional journalism formats, but that communicated that information more effectively and efficiently than those old forms could have.

Trying to impose those old forms on Romenesko’s blog not only ignores its purpose, it helps to defeat it, by cluttering it with pointless keystrokes.

As Topix CEO Chris Tolles tweeted, “CJR & Poynter represent neither reader nor journalist. Just voices from inside coffin of the institution of ‘editor’.” [Moos credited an editor at Columbia Journalism Review for tipping her to the quotation mark issue.]

Let’s not forget that ethics stand as means to an end. When ethical rules become an end to themselves, we open the door to actions that are right by the letter of the law but completely wrong by its spirit. Sometimes, the rules have to change to preserve their spirit. You want an everlasting code of ethics for journalism? Try this: Tell the truth, and by doing so, inspire people to read it, to share it and to act upon it.

Everything else is just technique.

Romenesko found a new way of communicating attribution that renders old “rules” about attribution irrelevant. Journalism leadership that focuses on the ends our ethics are supposed to guide us toward would have recognized that. Leadership that focuses on rules for rules’ sake, wouldn’t have. And didn’t.

It’s clear from this episode that something does need to change at Poynter. But it wasn’t Jim Romenesko.

(Romenesko is launching his personal website next month. I suspect that it will be taking away quite a bit of traffic from Poynter.org.)

Second, yesterday I also received a depressing survey from the Online News Association. Here are a few of the 15 questions asked:

1. Do you ever find it difficult to draw a line between advocacy and objectivity in your own work?

5. Do you believe that the use of social media as a a (sic) reporting or news aggregation tool carries a risk creating demographic and informational silos?

6. Are you conflicted about creating your own “brand” or identity on your social media channels?

7. Do you believe your ties with your social media community(ies) influence your ability to maintain fairness and objectivity?

Oh, for goodness’ sake.

I’m hoping that these are clumsily-worded questions, and not reflective of ONA’s institutional attitude. (Though even that wouldn’t speak well of a professional organization dedicated to better communication online.)

On 1: Advocacy and objectivity are not mutually exclusive. Advocacy is part of every journalist’s duty. We should advocate for our reporting, for our communities and for the rights of all to express themselves in public forums. (Though we are allowed to advocate against what some people use those forums to say, especially when they try to deny rights to others.)

We achieve objectivity when our reporting can be duplicated and not contradicted by others who are reporting independently of us. Eliminating advocacy in the name of achieving objectivity does not necessarily bring us any closer to the point where our work can be verified by others. But it does isolate us from the communities and causes we should be helping by illuminating the truth.

On 5: The mass market was a myth. As soon as publishing technology allowed them the choice, they were going to choose to read and watch information that fit their interests and traditions. Ignoring social media won’t bring the audience back together, as they were when technology limited readers to getting news from a local paper. It simply will render journalists irrelevant to modern publishing and communication.

On 6: Please tell me that this question gets a 100% “No” response. What, you don’t like having a byline?

On 7: I actually screamed when I read this one. Establishing ties with your community are essential in maintaining fairness in your reporting. You need to know the people in your community, and be willing to meet them and interact with them where they are – whether than be in schools, community meetings, churches, parks and, yes, on social media networks.

But the previous questions framed social media as a “risk” and “conflicted,” which leads the survey-taker to think of social media as a negative influence on good things such as, presumably, fairness and objectivity. I reject that framing, but I feared that a “yes” answer would be interpreted by the ONA as affirming that framing. So how the heck I am supposed to answer if I want to defend the use of social media in reporting?

It’s enough to make you scream.

The first was a post on the ProPublica website Monday offering a “step by step guide” and searchable database for anyone tracing the influence of a nonprofit organization called ALEC that has proven highly effective in developing “model bills” for state legislatures.

The second was a conference call Tuesday that drew about 140 people to hear about using ProPublica-built data and a news application for reporting on education access issues in local schools and districts.

ProPublica published a national story based on the data, examining the relationship of poverty to educational access, along with a Facebook-integrated app for looking up and comparing schools and districts.

These two efforts are moves in the right direction not just for ProPublica but for journalism and the public. By sharing data and making it easy to use, ProPublica produces more value from its deep investments of time and expertise. ProPublica can also benefit from the insights and experiences of others who share or report on the data.

During the conference call, reporter Sharona Coutts, news application developer Al Shaw and computer-assisted reporting director Jennifer LaFleur heard questions, comments and suggestions. Reporters, whose affiliations included both traditional and startup news organizations, also poked and prodded at some of the findings.

As anyone who’s worked with databases knows, data analysis tends to prompt as many questions as it answers. The ProPublica team explained what they’d done to clean up and amplify two major sets of federal data and encouraged reporters to add their knowledge and mash up the new data with other sources. ProPublica also emailed followup links later to those on the call.

This kind of nitty-gritty, story-specific journalism discussion has generally occurred mainly among a limited subset of journalists through specialized skills organizations (such as Investigative Reporters and Editors), in training seminars or in members-only settings. ProPublica’s model shows the promise of opening up that discussion much more broadly — not just among journalists, but for public view of how journalism is done.

Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s general manager, told me that transparency and public engagement have been part of the core discussion at ProPublica since its launch in 2008. In the past year ProPublica has accelerated its social media push, growing Twitter followers by more than five times (55,883 as of this morning) and Facebook friends by more than three times (20,280).

ProPublica has as much competitive DNA as any news organization. Yet Tofel and Editor in Chief Paul Steiger note that their decisions to share databases and expertise don’t have to pass muster with corporate owners or stockholders.

Last year, a ProPublica collaboration with several other news organizations on a project called “Dollars for Docs,” showing pharmaceutical company payments to physicians, expanded its impact after the initial series by sharing and inviting further use of ProPublica’s data. Eventually, dozens of print, online and broadcast outlets drew on the database to produce stories. ProPublica’s “tools and data” page shows other examples.

Given ProPublica’s mission to “make change,” Tofel said, anything that extends the organization’s reach is worth trying.

“That tends to drive us toward open source and it tends to drive us toward sharing,” Tofel said, “and it tends to drive us toward wanting people to follow up on our stuff.”

ProPublica benefits from such followup as its work is credited broadly and its databases and stories are linked off other sites. Social media efforts like the #muckreads feature launched recently (Tweet stories using the #muckreads hashtag and ProPublica considers and aggregates on its site), along with news apps and story links, can help boost traffic to the ProPublica site, now at about 300,000 monthly unique visitors and 1 million monthly page views.

The Web, of course, offers many resources for learning about journalism. Poynter has greatly expanded its online training and knowledge-sharing, through blogs and the News University curriculum, and numerous journalism/media blogs publish spot reports, opinion pieces and guidance that fuel shared learning. Foundation and university-led institutes and websites keep up a steady stream of conversation about ideas and practices. And professional organizations play varying roles in learning for members, with IRE standing out as a leader.

ProPublica adds a new dimension as a news organization sharing its resources directly.

The Web and social media channels also are rich in open discussion and knowledge sharing about some aspects of news and information online — data analysis and visualization, use of social media, new tools and technology. Tech culture is intersecting more and more with journalism, and journalism can gain much more from that influence than new gadgets for old ideas.

Journalism researchers Nikki Usher and Seth C. Lewis explored this idea in an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog examining how open-source themes emerged in the learning lab portion of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership. (I wrote here earlier about the partnership, known as “Mojo.”)

“What can open source teach journalism,” Usher and Lewis asked, “and journalism open source?”

Their findings outline ways the authors think some of the ideas of open-source software align, or don’t, with journalism: transparency, iteration, standards and collaboration. The Mojo experiment should be a good test of cross-pollination.

I’d like to hear about and share other examples of open sharing of resources that enable public-affairs news and information. Please post examples in comments here or email me using the link above. I’ll report back here.

I always tell people that the best word count for an article is… just a few words short of how many your audience is willing to read on that topic.

Is that 50 words? 500? 5,000? 50,000? That’s up to your audience, and to you, with your ability to make the topic interesting to the audience.

I was so encouraged reading my OJR colleague Robert Hernandez’s Q&A with Evan Ratliff of The Atavist. In the post, Ratliff rejected the straw-man argument that some content is simply too long for people to read. (Go ahead and click back to read it if you haven’t yet. It’s well worth your time, and I’ll wait here for you.)

If you’re itching to trying writing in longer format, I think it’s important that you take some time to understand the changing dynamic of long-form writing in the Internet era from the readers’ perspective. Yes, I know that I’ve encouraged you to keep it tight, but if you can write in a way that sustains your reader’s attention, you can keep going far past what most copy editors would consider a maximum acceptable word count.

Let me state upfront my beliefs that readers’ attention spans are not declining. What is declining is the amount of time that readers have for each piece of content that comes their way.

Think back 20 years, if you’re old enough. How many items did you encounter that you could read in a given day? One newspaper? Maybe a magazine a few times month? Perhaps you read books, but probably no more than one at a time. Maybe you listened to the radio. Or watched TV. How many cable channels did your service deliver then? Think back before cable (if you can). How many TV channels did you have to choose from then? Five? Ten, if you lived in a big city?

Now, think about today. Maybe the number of print newspapers you read is down. (Sigh.) But how many websites do you see on a given day now? What about Facebook and Twitter? How many links come across your computer or phone each day? Do you listen to podcasts? What about satellite radio? Digital TV? Do read e-books? How many more options do you have to read or listen (or play) in a given day, compared with 10 years ago? Or 20? Or 30?

How many more hours do you have in the day to consume that content? Just the same 24, right? I was a math student, and I know that many journalists aren’t fans of the subject. But basic math tells us that when you try to divide many more content opportunities into the same number of hours of the day, the amount of time you have for each opportunity gets smaller and smaller.

That’s what many of us are seeing when we complain about short attention spans. It’s not that we can’t pay attention to longer forms. It’s that we have less time to make a decision about whether we should pay attention at all.

But once readers have made the decision to stick with something, many readers will stick with rewarding content for a long time. For years, I’ve been telling people at conferences that it’s ridiculous to assign short attention spans to a generation that will read 800-page “Harry Potter” books cover-to-cover. Or spend 10 or more a day mastering the latest release of “Madden.”

How much time have you spent playing “Angry Birds” this month? :^) A “short attention span” didn’t stop you, did it?

The challenge for a writer, filmmaker or application developer is to engage readers’ interest in that short moment the reader gives you before deciding to move on to something else. If you can grab attention in that moment, you have the opportunity to keep the reader with you indefinitely, based only upon your ability to hold that reader’s thoughts.

This is the great change in long-form writing in the Internet era. You can’t rely on a lack of other choices holding the reader with you until you get around to saying something compelling. You’ve got to give them something to get their attention right away.

Then, you need to continue to work to engage your audience, to earn the credibility to allow you to write more deliberately. Once you’ve earned an audience’s trust, they’ll allow you a little more time to lure them into a story.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the debut of another longer-than-your-average-blog-post journalism initiative, Grantland.com, a project of ESPN’s Bill Simmons. Simmons, who also helped drive the sports network’s recent long-form “30 for 30″ documentary series, long ago established himself with his audience by delivering irreverent, yet often insightful, narratives on sports and popular culture, page-count limits be damned. Critics have complained that his columns on ESPN have become ever more scarce, and filled with the same old schtick. But that he continues to attract so much attention, and has the juice within ESPN to launch projects such as “30 for 30″ and Grantland.com testifies to the success he had in building an audience over time, and the attention that audience will continue to give him as a result.

One of the first writers Simmons has hired for the new site is Katie Baker, who posted a “sneak preview” essay on the New York Knicks’ swift exit from this year’s NBA playoffs.

I think Baker is one of the freshest, most engaging young voices in sports journalism today. Her writing is naturally of and for online media, not adapted or affected for it. More importantly, she’s built an audience for her voice by grabbing readers with headlines such as The Confessions Of A Former Adolescent Puck Tease, then keeping them on the page with paragraph after paragraph of engaging storytelling.

That writers such as Baker are getting gigs and gaining readers should encourage fans of long-form writing. They’re destroying the straw man argument that readers won’t sit for longer articles. Heck, if someone can get the ‘go-for-the-quick-verbal-kill’ Deadspin audience to stick with her for over 5,000 words, any writer should be encouraged that taking extra time with a piece is possible.

For this week’s post, I spoke with Evan Ratliff, freelancer for publications such as Wired, The New Yorker, and others, turned digital entrepreneur and – if you believe some of the press – possible savior of the longform narrative with his new project, The Atavist.

NOTE: We met on a collaborative document and you can playback our unedited conversation here.

Evan, thank you for taking the time to “meet” for a quick chat about the project you are working on.

My pleasure!

So, let’s start there… can you describe what The Atavist is?

Sure, so The Atavist is a kind of hybrid publication: We sit right in between magazines and books. From the magazine angle, what we do is called “longform nonfiction” or “longform journalism:” We produce stories that are 6-7,000 words and up, all the way to maybe 30-35,000. All nonfiction, all written by people who have spent weeks or months reporting them. They are published digitally, through our app for iPad/iPhone, through Kindle (Kindle Singles, which we can talk about), and Nook. From the book perspective, they are almost like short ebooks.

We also license our software, but that’s our more non-journalism side of things so maybe less of interest here.

How did this idea come about? You have a background in longform storytelling… but how did the idea of an app and this “concept” of a custom storytelling platform come about?

It started with a pretty basic, and unformed, idea: Was there some way to do longform writing/journalism online? It was an idea I’d been thinking about for a while, but not doing much if anything about — I applied for a Knight Foundation grant but didn’t get it, in maybe 2008 (2007? Can’t remember). Anyway, originally Nick Thompson, my editor at Wired, and I were just saying that there must be some way to do longform that was more designed for the digital world. Instead of just translated straight from a magazine. The real conceptual ideas of how it might work didn’t come about until we sat down with our other partner, Jefferson Rabb, who has both the design sensibility and coding chops to actually conceive what something like that might look like. It was in talking to him that we stopped talking about the Web and started talking about an app.

Technically speaking, you could do these custom, interactive stories on the Web… what made it appealing on the iPad, Kindle, etc.?

I think that first, we just wanted to kind of get away from the idea of people reading it at their desktop, where they are skipping from one bit of information to the next all day. The emergence of phones – and actually we first were looking just at smart phones, noticing how much we and other people were reading on them – and then tablets, ereaders, etc, pointed a way to a different kind of digital reading experience. Marketing types now call it the “lean back” experience, which I don’t cotton to that much but the point is the same one we were going for: this is a different kind of reading than you do on the Web.

Full disclosure, I think the concept and platform a fantastic idea… and it’s an ideal mashup of interactive/digital and traditional storytelling. I’ll embed the video from the site, but can you briefly list the features/media/interactivity/etc. a user would find in a “typical” Atavist story?

So, I should probably first offer the caveat that of course you get different versions of Atavist stories in different environments. On Kindle – for the moment – you’ll get just the full text of the story, and photos, maybe some footnotes. In our app, the standard features are a bit different, just because we are able to control the whole environment and use multimedia however seems to suit. The standard features on every story in the app are: the text and full page photos (of course), an audiobook version of the story (you can flip back and forth between reading and listening), usually some elements of other media (music, video, woven into the narrative), and then what we call inline extras: Parts of the story that serve as a kind of substrate. These are links to characters, photo galleries, maps, timelines, audio clips that you can turn on and off. If they are on, you tap a word or phrase and the feature pops up.

I purchased and read your piece, Lifted, and thought it was a natural experience… I did find myself torn between reading or listening to the audio version of the story (I am a podcast junkie, though). Granted, you’ve just launched, and this is a brand new form of storytelling… custom-crafted, interactive pieces for each story. What new things do you have to factor in that you never had to think about in the past… like when you wrote a Wired piece?

It’s true, all these new questions arise pretty quickly, and we’re still trying to figure out how to answer them. Take the video, for instance. That piece Lifted had a critical piece of video, the surveillance tapes from the heist that was portrayed in the story. I wanted that to form the lede of the piece. Which instantly created two problems; no, three: 1. How do you write a kind of secondary lede, to follow a piece of video? Do you assume that, with a written lede, someone will have read everything up to that point? Or might they have skipped part of the video? 2. What to do on other platforms, where the story would not have the video? The text itself had to work as an intact narrative, without the video. And 3. What to do about sound? The video had no sound, so it can’t really be “included” in the audiobook version.

Those are all questions that obviously wouldn’t come up when writing a magazine place, not to mention: where to put it, how much to use, how to edit it, whether and how to score it, etc. etc.

What’s also exciting, is that those questions were tied to that one story… they may not be asked again or exactly the same in another Atavist story, right? Or the answers would be different, depending on the story. With what you’ve produced so far, can you say what makes for a good Atavist story?

Right, some of them may be moot in other stories. We had another piece with a lot of music in it, and it had a whole set of other questions around the soundtrack that haven’t come up elsewhere.

I think we’re still feeling it out when it comes to what works well. There’s no question that the story – as in the real plot and characters portrayed – is always going to make the biggest difference.

Well, let me ask a basic yet complex question… how is this whole thing going?! Are you a zillionaire? Is this a new revolution you are a part of? Have you ever thought you’d an entrepreneur? How’s the experience of launching The Atavist been?

Let’s just say this: If things keep going like they are, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to get a new chain for my bicycle. Which I think we both know that only a hundredaire could do.

HA! I love that journalism pays the same in all platforms. But it’s a passion project with endless possibilities, no?

Indeed. But there is a financial element that is not as bleak (I hope) as I tend to joke. So, there’s a few levels I could talk about how it’s going.

Without a doubt, you have a business model that makes sense… in fact you have two. Individual stories and licensing.

Yes, so let’s take the stories first. We knew going in, and nothing has yet proven us wrong, that it’s very difficult to build up a readership from scratch. If you recall the heyday of big magazine launches, they would do things like buy up subscriber lists and just send them the magazine, and lose millions of dollars trying to gain a substantial readership. Our marketing budget so far topped out at right around $0. So we’re pretty pleased with the number of readers we’ve had (everybody asks; we always say “tens of thousands total, for all the stories,” but not much more than that). We’ve used the first few stories to get enough revenue to fund some more, which was our first milestone we were aiming at. Next up is proving that this sort of small-scale, small-team version of longform journalism can consistently make the money to be sustaining. That means getting more readers, and getting them to come back.

On the licensing side we haven’t announced anything yet, but we’ve found a huge, frankly kind of shocking to us in size – we can’t deal with the influx of interest at the moment – interest in utilizing the app platform and CMS for different types of publishing. Some of them you’d only loosely think of as “publishing:” in the financial field, the medical field. So we are really hoping that that side can help support the journalism side while we are starting out, to give us time to grow the readership.

And maybe even pay ourselves something some day!

It will be a new, gold chain on that bike! Seriously, it’s no easy task what you’ve done. Congratulations, by the way. Do you have any lessons you’ve learned that you can share with those thinking about experimenting, developing an idea?

Solid gold. Thanks! It’s been a bit harrowing at times.

Well, a couple things I learned quickly: In the digital world, if that’s where your experiment is going to exist (and most do these days, I suppose), you have to find a designer/developer who understands what you are trying to do. In our case, we got incredibly lucky with Jefferson Rabb, who not only understood, he actually was able to create it in ways we hadn’t thought of. Now, if you are one of those new-style journalists that can do it all: write and report and code and design, well, that’s amazing. But if not, befriend great coders! Find ones who like to read!

The second big thing is—and I think I probably used to scoff a little at “entrepreneurial journalism” courses, or that sort of thing (I didn’t go to j-school, so it’s all a little foreign to me) – knowing how to do really mundane things to make a business work is actually incredibly useful. I’ve lost hours, nay, weeks, months, and lots of sleep, and probably hair, trying to puzzle out issues that were easily solved by someone who knows the first thing about running a business. So if you can get that somewhere, through experience or coursework or whatever, it’s going to save a lot of time that you could be spending on the thing you love, which is the writing and editing and publishing.

Great advice… you mentioned find developers who “like to read” … you spoke at SXSWi about longform storytelling and a lot of articles about The Atavist focus on the “death of longform” and how this may “save it” (no pressure, by the way). What do you think of the tltr (too long to read) culture. Is there a real threat here? Is this hype? Or is it all true and you found the silver bullet to save the world (no pressure).

Yeah, I love those stories…

To be really honest, I have no idea. I’m always asked, in panels like that, what I think of it, and I hate being the guy who just makes sh-t up because they happen to be connected to a field. My answer is: I don’t think anybody knows, and mostly the folks who pontificate about attention spans and reading and news are substituting what they do and want for what “readers” do and want. At some basic level, obviously we are ingesting a lot of information in shorter chunks, more constantly, and all of that, which is written about ad nauseum. At another basic level, people still buy a lot of books. People still buy a lot of nonfiction books. People are buying more and more ebooks, in huge numbers. So for us, I don’t really care if at some broad level, some people are saying “nobody reads long stuff anymore.” It’s just not true. The only question for us is: Can we get the people who do read long stuff to read our long stuff. And I think there are plenty of those people out there, and (as Byliner, newly launched, is also proving), maybe even untapped folks who are ready for / looking for great stories of this style and length.

I completely agree with you. People are consuming more media in more ways. But, a good story is still a good story. Make sure you are using all the new — and old — storytelling techniques to engage your reader/listener/viewer/user.

Right, and it’s the same with multimedia. People say: “Readers don’t really want videos and audio in their story.” By which they mean, they don’t. But some people do. And if the story is better told with it, why not try to find that balance that makes for the most gripping possible narrative?

So, I just “tweeted” (I feel awkward typing that word rather than saying it) out that I was chatting with you and am crowdsourcing any questions. I got one from @mattvree, who asks, “Any plans to move beyond just longform written journalism, and expand to multimedia and documentary?”

Not at the moment. We’ve got our hands full with our current efforts. Of course we think about the possibility of expanding into different areas down the road. But we feel like we’re barely getting started with our current approach, and it would be madness to try and take on new types of efforts before we feel we have the old one nailed. One thing we may be doing is a piece or two that are more visual than they are textual. So the current balance of text-to-image is almost reversed, and the story is told primarily through visuals. But that’s still in the works.

Let me ask you some questions that I, some type of Web journo nerd, routinely like to ask other journos.

First, I’m always fascinated with names/branding, so where did the name The Atavist come from? I assume it wasn’t inspired by the metal band Otep, which put out an album with the same name (thank you Wikipedia).

It’s out today!! We’ve really been anticipating the release date, because our Twitter stream is filled with absolutely insane OTEP fans who have been counting down the days for almost two months.

HAHAHA! Okay, so, what’s the backstory to your use of The Atavist?

But no, not inspired by. I started using it as my personal domain years ago, it’s a tiny sideways allusion to Hunter S. Thompson‘s work; atavist and atavistic are words that, if you read a lot of HST (as I once did), he drops in quite often. And then when we wanted to start something, we went through literally hundreds of possible names. Actually Jefferson once made an app that just randomly generated names for us. But then we came back to it, and decided that the actual meaning, a biological feature that’s disappeared and then suddenly reappears, had some salience. Storytelling reappearing in the digital realm, or whatnot. And it’s fairly unique, which means people can find it in the app store — more important than you’d think. Some people seem to hate it, but overall it seems like people are ok with it.

Second, this has become one of my standard questions…. in these “tough times,” why are you a journalist? What drives you and keeps you going in this field?

For me, it’s probably not as noble as it is for some journalists. On the writing end, I just really like digging into things, getting obsessed with topics, meeting fascinating people, and getting to go interesting places. On the publishing side of things, now I want to give other writers the chance to do all of those things. Of course sometimes the more noble aspects are part of it: shedding light on an important topic, investigating some malfeasance. And sometimes the least noble parts: seeing ones name as a byline. But mostly it’s just fun to go out into the world, find a story, and then figure out how to tell it.

And as someone who has freelanced for 10 years, it’s always seemed like tough times. It’s always full of rejection, and failure, and dry periods, and occasionally empty bank accounts. So I don’t see much difference now from when I started (although of course I realize other folks do).

Well, Evan… thank you for taking the time to chat with me. I hope this format wasn’t too awkward. I really enjoyed out conversation and wish you luck on your current and new adventures.

Thanks, I enjoyed it!

Robert Hernandez is a Web Journalism professor at USC Annenberg and co-creator of #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web Journalists held on Twitter. You can contact him by e-mail (r.hernandez@usc.edu) or through Twitter (@webjournalist). Yes, he’s a tech/journo geek.

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.

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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.

Did you lose traffic? Gain it? Did you even notice?

Sistrix tracked the carnage among some of the top so-called content farms on the Internet, based on keyword positioning within search engine results pages [SERPs]. Among the losers in the Sistrix report were Associated Content, Mahalo and Examiner.com.

Personally, I don’t track keyword placement in SERPs for my websites. I track traffic and revenue. And I did see a drop in Google-directed traffic late last week on one of my websites, but a slight increase on the other. When I looked more closely at the loss in Google traffic, I didn’t see in decrease in referrals for the most popular keyphrases people were using to find my site, according to my Google Analytics report. All the loss seemed to be coming from the long tail, the all-but-forgotten, individually low-trafficked discussion threads and obscure listing pages on my site that I would just as soon Google ignore.

Well, consider that wish granted. The data does suggest to me, though, that Google’s not targeting entire sites with this latest algorithm change, but individual pages based on the thoroughness and uniqueness of their content.

Frankly, tracking keywords and obsessing about how highly your copy ranks in search engines provides one of the faster ways to go crazy in the online news business. With Google moving more toward highly personalized SERPs, chasing keywords is a fool’s pursuit.

It’s time to forget about SEO [Search Engine Optimization] and time to focus instead on PEO [Plain English Optimization].

Too many writers think of SEO as writing for computers, when their real focus should be writing to meet the needs of a human audience. Ask yourself these questions whenever you write:

• Are you writing about something that people have personal experience with or personal interest in? Can you express that audience “need” in 10 words or less? Have you done that in the story?
• Does your article do anything to provide a practical take-away that helps readers address this need, whether it be a to-do-list (even a short one) or at least relevant, previously unknown information about the topic? Can you describe that take-away in 10 words or less? Have you done that in the story?
• Are you writing using the words and phrases that normal readers – people who aren’t your sources and co-workers – use when they talk about this topic? Are you using the vocabulary of a 10th grader, or a 10-year professional in the field?
• Describe your piece in three words. Do those three words appear in the headline, the title tag or at least within the opening paragraph? How long does the reader have to read your piece before he or she will know what you’re writing about?
• Are you drowning your reporting under too many words?

These principles aren’t incompatible with SEO, in fact they’re part of what many of us have been suggesting as basic “white hat” SEO principles in the past.

But with SERPs so variable these days, and with too many writers unable to get over the idea that SEO is writing for machines, I think that many of us would find it easier, not to mention far more productive, to think about Plain English Optimization instead.

Think about the people who will read what you write. What are their needs? What are you doing to help meet at least one of those needs in this piece? Are you keeping it clear and simple?

Write to PEO, and the SEO will take care of itself.

Just because your blogging tool lets you ramble on forever doesn’t mean your audience wants to read it.

The New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote:

One of the hardest things about writing the column, as opposed to blogging, is the length constraint. It’s really, really hard to say something meaningful in a limited space. And yet, that constraint has its virtues: it forces you to be concise, to figure out what you really need to say and skip the rest, to find turns of phrase that are shorter and usually plainer. And my experience is that the process of doing all that almost always makes the thing read better.

I think Twitter’s has helped sharpen writers’ skills over the past few years. Think Krugman’s 800-word cap is tight? Try 140 characters. But too many writers switch mental gears when they close their Twitter application and open their blogging CMS.

Not everyone need write as tightly as Atrios, but why not make an extra effort to focus your words? Concentrate the power of your work into fewer words, so that they’re more likely to drive your audience to act upon them – to share them and promote your work with others. Dilute your work into too many words, and your audience will get bored and drift away.

Try this: For the next piece you post on the Internet, stop yourself before you hit the “submit” key. Copy and paste your words into some text editor. Count the words. Now try to cut half of them.

Can you make the same points? Keep all the important information?

If you can’t cut half the words, surely you could cut one-third of them.

Try this for your next 10 posts – whether they be blogs, columns, articles or comments. See if – or how – your writing changes under this demand.

If only more content management systems displayed the number of words as you typed, as Twitter counts down your remaining characters. Heck, maybe some CMS developer could bring back Clippy, who’d start yawning once you hit the 500 word mark. (You probably wouldn’t even need it to yawn – the mere sight of that thing returning to your screen should provide enough Pavlovian conditioning to make you stop writing.)

Yeah, I know. Writing online’s competitive. You want to get your stuff up, fast. Like Pascal, you know that it takes more time to write a short piece than a long one.

So that’s why you need practice writing tightly.

Start now. Wrap it up.

Don’t make me send Clippy after you.

Being interviewed is part of the duties of a successful website publisher – you’ll need to know how to promote yourself and your publication in other media, to increase its exposure and drive new traffic.

To that end, I want you to watch this clip from one of the masters of entrepreneurial self-promotion:

Sure, Dolly Parton is on the show to talk about her support for LGBT youth. But notice how she slipped in a plug for every single project she has going currently? Her new musical, her single with Queen Latifah, her Dollywood theme park and her chain of Dixie Stampede dinner shows. She plugged ‘em all.

That, friends, is a pro at work.

But let’s also notice three important points about interview opportunities:

1) A plug is not your pitch

Parton didn’t launch into a 30-second pitch for Dollywood when she mentioned her Tennessee theme park. She simply name-checked it. Too many sources blow their plug by talking too much about the project. If the moment’s right later in the interview, you can talk in more detail, but initially, it’s enough to just work in the name.

2) Look for the right context to bring up your projects

Which brings us to the second point. You’ve got to work your plugs into the context of the interview. Though the topic of interview was acceptance of LGBT youth, Parton expanded the topic to include race in order to work in a vignette spawned by a plug for her project with Queen Latifah. That provided the plug with the context that made it seems a natural part of the interview, and not a forced promotion for something which didn’t relate.

Same with the plugs for Dollywood and Dixie Stampede. Parton worked plugs for those family attractions into the context of talking about her extended family.

If the context isn’t there, you can’t make the plug. So, sometimes, as Parton did, you need to steer the conversation a bit to set up the plug. Steer it too far off topic, though, and the plug won’t seem natural or authentic and – unless you’re on a live broadcast interview or online chat – won’t make the cut into the story. And you likely won’t be inviting back for additional interviews, either. Ultimately, you’re there to advance the story. Plugs come within that context, or not at all.

3) Pronouns are your enemy

When you’re talking about your publication, never fall into the trap of using pronouns to reference it. The majority of your references should use the name of the site. Sure, you’ll need to use pronouns now and then to keep from sounding like a shrill shill, but many journalist/publishers are so sensitive to that risk that they take it too far in the other direction, and neglect to ever mention the name and URL of their site.

We’ll be talking more about promoting the news in future weeks on OJR. But I’d love to hear some of your tips, in the comments.

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The year-in-review story is a classic news device to recycle coverage at the end of the year. Execute it well, and a year-in-review piece can become an excellent promotional tool, too, educating your audience about the extent of coverage that you’ve provided throughout the year.

This example from Denver’s Westword not only showcases the paper’s past work, it provides an outstanding example of effective hyperlinking. The piece tempts the reader to click links, then rewards them with good content – encourage readers to rack up the pageviews. Don’t forget this technique with your years in review coverage.

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The Inigo Montoya Word of the Week: This week’s word is Randy. Sure, in the United States, that’s just some guy’s name. But in the United Kingdom? Uh, it means something else.

This week’s word stands as a reminder that when you publish online, your work can be read all over the world. Sometimes, that means readers in other countries will find meaning in your vocabulary you never intended. Here’s a story about the day when I had to wear a “Randy” nametag for my job at Walt Disney World (I’d lost my “Robert” one), and the interesting reaction it provoked from some elderly British ladies.

Check out these pages and this webpage from another successful media entrepreneur, Rick Steves, for translations of British English into American English, and vice versa.

First, allow me to admit that I’m a dreadful candidate for the office of language cop. If it weren’t for gym, grammar would have been my least favorite subject in school. If your readers can figure out what you meant to say, you done wrote good enough, in my view.

But getting your readers to understand what you’re trying to say is just part of your job as a writer online. You’ve got to lure new readers with your words, too. Your current readers can help, by retweeting, liking, sharing and blogging your articles. But, for many of us, the bulk of our new readers arrive via search engines.

Search engine optimization [SEO] rewards obsessive attention to language – English as well as hypertext markup. Writing for my own website, without a copy desk to save my reputation, has forced me to think more carefully about the words I use. That’s why I started looking up the definition of at least one word I thought I knew in each article I post.

This new habit is changing the way I write. I’d like to think that it is helping me use adjectives more precisely, but at first it just made me afraid of them. Discovering how little I knew about the alternate meanings of words such as “incredible” disturbed me.

So what did I do? I stopped using so many of them. Rather than take the time to look up all those adjectives and adverbs, I just cut some of them out. Those I kept, I meant.

Sure, the language can expand to accommodate slang and idiomatic meanings for many words. But do you need to burden your writing with them?

Search engines reward articles with a high percentage of relevant keywords. Stripping extra words from your work leaves you with a higher percentage of those keywords in your remaining copy. If you want to use an adjective in your work, then make it carry some weight. If a word doesn’t work on multiple levels, it’s not doing enough work for you. Pick another one, or do without it.

I’ve become a huge fan of hard-coding my own HTML templates, because I can strip the extraneous tags that weigh down a webpage and rob it of SEO appeal. Reporters should do the same with their language.

No, you don’t have to. If people get what you’re trying to say, that’s good enough. But in a highly competitive online publishing market, shouldn’t try to do better, to lure an ever-larger audience to your work?

You want to learn how to write for SEO? This is how you start.

So I invite you to try my trick: Look up at least one word in every article you write. See what you discover. Make your words carry multiple meanings. And learn to leave out a few, too.

That said now, here’s my Inigo Montoya word of the week: Terrific.

Sure, it means “extraordinarily great.” But let’s look at a few other words in that definition: “intense,” “wonderful” and the ones found in the third meaning – “causing terror.”

“Terrific” has become one of my go-to words for describing outstanding roller coaster drops, or other elements on amusement park thrill rides. I love how the reference to terror gives this adjective a darker flavor. Why dilute the potential power of this word by using it in a context devoid of those qualities, when one of perhaps another dozen adjectives could stand in its place?

Make your words carry multiple meanings. Reward your readers who know them. Educate those who don’t. Use a word only when you mean that word.

An intense experience that causes wonder, even terror. Yeah, that’s terrific.