What if all stories were three paragraphs max?
Kevin Matthews writes over at his blog:
(…) we know from reader research that readers very rarely get beyond the third paragraph.
What’s more, reader comments are becoming as important to the audience as the story.
So, if reader behaviour surveys are to be believed, most readers will read the start of the story and skip to the comments below.
I commented that this could be seen as a case for journalists to write shorter stories for online and save the meat for the comments where they can truly engage with the readers. The more I think about it, the more things I can come up with for the plus side of such an approach.
Let’s see what it would look like. You’d have a website where every story is no longer than three paragraphs. That seems amply sufficient: you’d have the intro to tell people what the story is and a second paragraph to explain why it should matter to them. You’d also have a third paragraph for those stories where you just can’t go with only two, but those should be the exception not the rule.
Only the stories that attract at least some response from the readers will be pursued and expanded with background and meatier analysis in the comments. This would allow journalists to have a genuine conversation with their readers and would also be very efficient because each story would get minimum resources until proven worthwhile.
It could work, couldn’t it? In fact, I bet it is already working somewhere. I haven’t found where yet, but let me know if something comes to mind.
It might work for some stories but I can’t see how it would work for all stories. For example, I’d like to see how this week’s Guardian/Trafigura/Cater-Ruck story could have been told in three pars, or the collapse of Lehman’s bank or other complicated stories about the global recession.
I do skim stories, often only the first two pars, but if the story is good and important and those two pars hold my attention, I’ll read on to the end, even if it’s a 2,000 word article.
Louise, sure, there will be stories that require more words. But I don’t think there will be many of them, at least compared with the total. I reckon 80-90% of stories could get the 3-paragraph treatment, which will be a relief in an overstretched newsroom.
Well I’m sure we can all think of at lesat one story in the 24 hours which would have been overwritten at 3 pars, can’t we Ms Moir.
Two things strike me. 1. Even if it never made the final publication, the 3 par rule would be a good training discipline and make writing the teasers a lot easier in the same way writing Bills improves headlines.
The other issue would be page views online – if the story is essentially contained in the headline and a slightly extended teaser, it would create poor usability to force users to click though for just a par and a bit. Stopping the click through would effectively reduce traffic by up to half so unlikely to be appealing to publishers even if it proves good for users.
Sarah, I guess people would click through to see the comments on stories that have any. You are certainly right — it would mean less content to place ads next to. But are not many news websites already having trouble selling their inventory. Cutting back on content could be useful to the publishers as well as to the readers. Finding out which content exactly to cut is a tough call, but I think reader engagement could be a gauge.
Of course, this is all oversimplified. That is why we need to see examples.
Dilyan, I do think we should try something like this. If you have a bright idea, do set an example for everyone else. Besides, if you want people to believe you, better show them than just talk.
And another thing comes to mind when I’m contemplating your three par proposal – the success of a news service built on 80-90% short stories would depend very much on your audience. I do not think that every target group would be satisfied with only 200 to 300 words. But if you target your product right, you might get a great response.
Interestingly, we’ve been doing a bit of this with our lead stories recently. Reader comments suggest they don’t even notice it’s a truncated version (implying they don’t miss the extra copy) and that four pars is plenty for us to give them the facts they feel they need. Certainly hasn’t impacted on our page impressions or comments.
I don’t know if we could do our job properly with four pars on every story (a bit like listening to BBC Radio One news, you never get the nuances) but I’m not sure that the readers would necessarily notice. My preference would be to combine it with a “for more on this story” when the subject merits it, and the “more” would be the reporter’s background and archive material that built up as the story developed over time.