So Simple. So Smart.

On Tuesday night, while results from the Kentucky and Oregon Democrat primaries were coming in, the New York Times had this wonderful tool above the fold on its home page.

Meantime, the folks over at CNN.com offer the considerably more complicated (if subtle) calculator shown below.

Making complex material simple but accurate is one of the highest callings of journalism. Both sites attack this particular complexity well. But I give the nod to nytimes.com.

CNN: Leading the pack in. . .newswriting?

I’m only sort of kidding.

Click here. Or here. Or, what the heck, here. [Note from author: CNN doesn't have permalinks for its content, so these links keep going dead. If you wind up at a missing page, just click on any news story and you'll see the feature I'm talking about.--cs 5/28/08]

Notice that each of these stories appearing on the CNN website is topped by a bulleted list titled Story Highlights. The following text rides in a box alongside the headline of a story, “Russia: We did not drop missile”:

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Russia says it could not have dropped a missile in Georgia earlier this month
• Georgia accuses Russia of “shameless Soviet diplomacy”
• Experts from the U.S. among others have identified the missile as Russian
• Incident reignites feuding between Russia and its pro-Western neighbor

The folks at CNN have figured out what editors of newspapers figured out by the 1920s or so but then (how?) forgot when they made the transition to the Web: Above-the-fold matters. People skim the news, scanning headlines, decks, picture/captions, and reading (sometimes) ledes and (rarely) the story to the jump and (very rarely indeed) all the way to the end.

But the biggest group of people skims headlines, decks, pictures and captions. This is the news consumer, both in print and online.

The most successful newspaper websites don’t seem to get this. Many use only the headlines that appear in the day’s paper, or those that come on top of wire service stories. The best of them handcraft blurbs for stories that get bigger display. A few get pictures and captions.

But click on the article itself and get this from USA Today.

This from the New York Times. [This link is behind a pay wall. Again, any Times news story will do.--cs]

This from the Washington Post.

In these examples you’ll find decks, some multimedia enhancements, links, and so on.

But none of them has what, arguably, would be the most valuable service to Web readers of the news: A succinct summary on top of the story, above the fold, that needs no clicking or scrolling to consume.

My deduction: CNN creates very little original news–and, as a broadcast culture, accepts intuitively how short a news consumer’s attention span is. (Recall the ribbon of text scrolling across the bottom of its newscasts.) It has no vanity associated with its original news reporting, no need to spool out the whole 43-inch wordroll in order to comfort the top print editors, who (still!) insist their marquee work in the paper be marquee work on the Web, repurposed with little disruption to the version that is trucked each morning to readers’ homes.

CNN’s news summaries are often not very good. The language is sometimes dull, the details are poorly selected, insights are heroically resisted. They read like the work of junior producers in a hurry.

But the summaries exist, high up, bulleted and readable. This fact alone gives a majority of Web news readers–skimmers and dippers–a better experience.

The only website I’m aware of that campaigns to package news stories with this kind of efficient skimbait is the give-’em-a-break-they’re-still-in-beta site Newser. Its stories are topped by 100-word blocks of text, written by newswriters, and more insightful than CNN’s. But they are presented as blocks of text. No white space. Small text. From a usability perspective, these better writeups score lower than CNN’s bullets. Compare the Newser link above with any of the CNN links at the start of this blog entry and you’ll see what I mean.

I’d say it’s ironic that a broadcast website understands how to present news to an electronic user better than newspaper publishers that pay for serious reporting and news analysis.

But it’s not.

If newspapers took a cue from CNN’s packaging, and topped their full reports with easily skimmable summaries, they’d have the best of both worlds: Important, original news that carries out the vital functions of the Fourth Estate–and reaches the maximum audience.

Obesity Map: Just What the Web Doc Ordered

Let’s start the week with an item from the Web Done Right files: 

Take a look at CNN’s Fit Nation “Obesity in America” map. The feature illustrates, via a timeline slider and interactive national map, how much each state’s percentage of obese people increased between 1985 and 2004. It’s a great example of how a simple, often neglected 1.0 technique–Flash–can be effective when used properly.

There’s an even more effective rendering of the geography of obesity over at Revolution Health. Mouse over any state to see its obesity rate during any of the years covered, 1990 through 2006. [Interest revealed: I used to work at Revolution.]

The point: plain old-fashioned Web technology can be a powerful centerpiece even when surrounded by the usual 2.0fferings: UGC, vanity videos, blogs, etc. The temptation these days is to favor the faddish over the effective. Both sites show this isn’t necessary.

[Oddly, the CNN map shows the states with the highest obesity rates in red and those with lower rates in blue. The results is a map showing blue and red states. I wonder if Wolf Blitzer known about this.]

YouTube/CNN: Video’s “Actually” Moment

This evening broadcasters and bloggers alike will proclaim the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate a breakthrough in engaging young voters,  as a way to re-democratize democracy, as proof that technology is transforming the way political campaigns are conducted, yadayadablahblahblah.

All fine. All good.

[Though it must be mentioned that this will hardly be a victory for disintermediated politics, or the death of MSM, what with CNN, middling spawn of the Time-Warner oligopoly, controlling the questions, promoting the event, and providing the medium by which most folks will view it.]

Let’s take a breath and look at other technology “moments.” 

Remember when fax machines came out, and we all reveled in the novelty of being able to fax our pickup orders to restaurants?

Remember the first telephone answering machines, and we realized we could actually produce our own “personal” outgoing messages?

And when e-mail happened, when we could actually send jokes to people at work and they’d get them immediately? 

With cell phones, we could actually walk down the street and talk on the phone!

Ditto nearly every technological innovation: desktop PCs, PDAs, online forums, blogs, social networks. . .each went through its “actually” moment. Then the technology matured, the novelty wore off and people figure out, more or less, what the thing is actually good for.  

Now just happens to be homemade video’s “actually” moment–we can actually make videos to ask questions of presidential candidates!  

This moment will pass too.

Let me be the first to predict: There will be no YouTube debate for the 2012 election. Making videos to ask candidates questions is an instant period piece, an expression of a moment in time. It will seem as quaint and foolish in four years as those insuffrable answering machine messages did by 1983.

I’m sure there will be something new for the 2012 election: Avatar candidacies? Crowdsourced campaign plans? Wiki platforms? Behaviorally targeted mobile advertising? Maglev whistle-stops with holographic candidate “appearances”? Who’s to say? No matter what, though, using video to question candidates will be so over, as they say on FaceBook.

Anyway, let’s enjoy tonight’s festivities, and try not to assign it more significance than it deserves.

And to keep yourself grounded, remember this:

As of 4 p.m. today, the “most discussed” video on YouTube is. . .a kid’s videotaping his dad viewing YouTube–and then catching him naked in his bedroom a few moments later.

Enjoy the debate.

CNN: Renovation Done for Advertisers

Fascinating story came across the newsline today, describing how CNN’s recent re-do, which I have written about previously, was aimed largely at pleasing advertisers.

Wrote Gavin O’Malley of Online Media Daily:

The redesign, which launched earlier this week, was planned first and foremost to please advertisers, [CNN.com SVP and GM David] Payne insisted, and less cluttered and cleaner experiences were at the top of agencies’ wish lists.

“Advertisers want their ads to pop, which means getting them above the fold in an uncluttered environment.”

I’m no prude. As someone who toiled in the fields of pulp and ink for over 20 years, I’m well-acquainted with the adage (adage!) that journalists are people who write on the back of ads. Without ad support–which is to say happy advertisers–there is no way to fund the expensive work that major media does.

Still, the plain admission that advertisers were the first consitituency of the renovation illustrates a key cultural difference between the commercial environments online and in print. It’s hard to imagine the GM of a newspaper saying its redesign was done first and foremost for advertisers. Inevitably the GM would intone, however disingenuously, that the rework was done to improve service to readers.

It makes you wonder: Do new media execs simply feel more free to tell the truth than their print counterparts?

CNNot a great use of video

You might think that CNN, given its position in the cable TV newscape, would have a good chance of getting video right in the 2.0 world.

But no: CNN’s renovated Web site–which on the whole is extremely good, one of the more successful mainstream do-overs of the last year–makes the same amateurish video blunders you see Webwide these days. Four-minute stemwinders on a school beating. Two minutes of muddy water slamming into a bridge abutment. Two minutes of heads a-talking. This morning’s weather, still available this evening!  

The 2.0 video vice is sticking a set of cliplinks–any clips will do–headlined ”Watch our videos” above the fold.  [Three typical examples: www.webmd.com, www.janemag.com, www.pcmag.com.]

Saying “Watch our video” is sort of like saying “Read our words” or “Click our links.” Hell, why not come clean and just stick ”View our pages, repeatedly” across the top?

The point is that video should be used when it’s the best tool to deliver what users are looking for–not because the boss said “YouTube is sucking traffic from everybody, we need a video strategy by close of business Monday.” Or not because (as I’m guessing was the case at CNN.com) ”YouTube is sucking traffic from everybody, and we’ve got all this video that people seem to like okay on TV, so let’s stick it up on the Web and tell the suits in corporate that we’re amortizing production costs across multiple platforms.”

Anyhow, like all 2.0 spasms, the vid fad will fade when the numbers come up short. Webmakers will eventually figure out that video is just one of dozens of 2.0 technologies that can help accomplish some legit online mission. 

 And no, “View our pages, repeatedly,” doesn’t qualify as a legit online mission.