Story Review

Links for October 19, 2009:

• Semantics (and Metadata) at the New York Times « End of Business as Usual – Glenn’s External blog – “Yet another great presentation from the SemTech 2009 conference this past June in San Jose. This presentation is on Semantics at the New York Times.”
• Headlines and Deadlines: Google Wave, transparency* and engagement – “Google Wave is going to be what a journalist wants make it – crowdsourcing, debating, real-time news-gathering, breaking news, image sharing, archived events, live-blogging, polling, asking for feedback – but, I think, the most exciting thing it offers is the opportunity to change the way we think about interaction and engagement.”

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.

Links for October 15, 2009:

• Kevin Matthews: Comments and the death of the author: Putting the reader at the start and heart of the story – “… if reader behaviour surveys are to be believed, most readers will read the start of the story and skip to the comments below.”
• Headlines and Deadlines: Using animation to tell a news story – “I made my first cartoon using Xtranormal today; I know it’s a site usually used for making training and presentation tools, but I was interested in whether it might work for journalists. “
• Jo Wadsworth: Warts and all – @timesjoanna: ‘”There’s a man with an otter’s corpse here to see you” The joys of local journalism’
• Kevin Matthews: Twitter: the political tool greater than the party political broadcast? But by God it can bite – “Undoubtedly inspired by the success of the Obama social media campaign who managed to turn tweets to votes, so the Brits have arrived.”
• FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools | SAP Web 2.0 – A beta version of PowerPoint Twitter Tools is now available for testing. See and react to tweets in real-time, embedded directly within presentations, either as a ticker or refreshable comment page.
• Jo Wadsworth: Advertising moving online – but where? – “… social media allows brands to bypass mass media entirely.”

Links for October 1, 2009 to October 5, 2009:

• TEDx Manchester – some thoughts – There’s a lot of coverage on the TEDx Manchester event, and Louise Bolotin’s link-rich sum-up post is a great way to start.
• Journalists? Bloggers? Citizens? Who are these people? – “What do we call someone who’s taken it on themselves to start a website for the local community and how should they be treated?”
• Mainstream media and the Fifth Estate – BBC journalist Nic Newman “looked at five different mainstream news organisations and concluded that social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook together with a rise in citizen journalism had formed a ‘Fifth Estate’.”
• Reception of my paper about online promotion of new music | BasBasBas.com – DD: BasBasBas wrote a paper saying that “giving away something of value for free can be a great promotional tool”. Then he gave it away to prove his point.
• Headlines and Deadlines: The problems with second-guessing our online audience – “A slideshow presentation into the US news industry brought home to me the risks that accompany assuming you know your readership well. It (…) shows the majority incorrectly assumed readers found their content very valuable; they also stated a belief that readers would struggle to find adequate replacements – the reader response was that they wouldn’t find it difficult.”

Links for September 30, 2009:

• High-fens | Diary of a Wordsmith – “Style is often a matter of choice rather than a hard and fast rule.”
• Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby – A poignant guide to Ruby. (ta Jo)