Andrew Sullivan on Blogging: Unreadable Online

I periodically make a Print ‘n’ Read recommendation–a piece of writing about the social web that’s so compelling it’s actually worth firing up the ol’ HP Inkjet and printing out to read later.

In this case it’s Andrew Sullivan’s Why I Blog.

It is, of course, utterly unreadable on the web. At 5,200 words, on the website of the Atlantic it requires clicking through four “pages,” each of which is five screens deep. Even if you have an Aeron chair with lumbar support you’re courting orthopedic danger attempting to read this thing online.

But [or I should say, therefore] it’s one of the most thinking, engaging and true pieces of writing about blogging I’ve come across.

Giving himself the opportunity to reflect and dig–which, Sullivan points out, blogging does not–in this long-form article he surfaces many insights that will resonate with anyone who has spent much time typing into a blog’s vacant white box.

For instance:

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague.

But, alas, Sullivan & Co. push their luck. The printed magazine promises “More Online”–a video in which Sullivan and fellow Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder discuss the blogging life. Sounded like a bad idea to me–a video of two guys talking about blogging. Ack.

But, as a dutiful student of digital media, I went looking. I couldn’t find it anywhere online. Huh. So I typed in the url the magazine published in ink on its paper pages. I hit “enter.”

Here’s what I saw.

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.

asap’s Patriot(ic) Act

If you can’t make it to any fireworks this evening — or you’re weary of the whole picnic-basket-and-battle-the-traffic thing–click over to asap, the Associated Press’s extraordinarily good site targeting what they hope will be the next generation of news consumers.

The site’s Firefox-friendly fireworks show demonstrates just a few things asap, now about 18 months old, does so well:

Matches the medium with the message. Note that while the presentation is technically a video, the user experiences it as a slide show set to music. 

Takes wise advantage of “regular” AP’s first-class assets, in this case several dozen smart, remarkable photos of fireworks taken all over the world. There is not a visual cliche in the bunch. Brilliant photo editing here.  

Declines to pander.  Lesser minds would have set the slide show to a musical backdrop of Death Cab for Cutie or John Mayer–you know, “kids’ music.” Here the soundtrack is a vintage vinyl recording of (what I assume to be) a mid-century orchestra performance of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” providing a slight wink of irony underneath it all. 

Exudes contrary but not hostile energy. The (brief) text is devoted to fireworks as they are done around the world–Italy, France, Japan and China, not the U.S. The main story source is not, refreshingly, a member of the chronically overexposed Grucci family. Interviewing the Gruccis for July 4 stories is as hackneyed as interviewing that idiot in the hat on Ground Hog Day.

Three audio clips extend the surprisingly insightful interview, but like most “on-screen” audio they present a lousy user experience. (Show of hands: Has anybody ever listened to an audio clip without clicking away to do something else while it plays? Anyone?) 

There is much more to say about asap, most of it good. I’ll get to that later. Meantime, enjoy the show.