On answering the “why” and “what’s next” component of news stories that the AP says young news consumers want more of: The answers are already there, but paragraphs are a problem
Written by amedeo on June 3rd, 2008
Problem
- Often, the who-what-where-when-why-how (and “what’s next”) get blended together in a way that is aesthetically pleasing (in terms of logic, musicality and pacing), but fail to offer easy scannability that Web reading behavior calls for.
- As a reader, I have to run my eyes up and down a story to find facts that interest me at that moment, and though news stories often use the pyramid writing style, the pyramid is a subjective approach that may or may not be useful to me.
- For example, if I want to find all the people involved in a story, I may have to scan 30 paragraphs. What if I could just go to a “who” subhead or tab? This would create a logical, predictable pattern of story organization, whereas now a story’s organization is entirely dependent upon idiosyncratic interpretations (by writers and editors) of aesthetics and the importance of one piece of information over another (which is actually a valuable service, but one being offered in a one-size-fits-all manner at the moment).
Solution
- Despite the aesthetic brutality of it, it might make more sense on the Web to provide the components of a story as clearly labeled sections. Think of a single pane with tabs (or subheads) for each component. The “Who” tab, the “What” tab, the “Why” tab and so on.
Inspiration for this post
- The Associated Press report on a new model for news said, as I mentioned in the post below this one, that young news consumers gobble up news in the form of Facts, Updates, Back Stories and Future Stores.
- However, they felt overwhelmed by Facts and wanted more Back Stories and Future Stories, but had trouble finding these more in-depth components.
- I felt that all four of those components were often present in stories, but organization by paragraph often made it difficult to quickly find such info in the order one might want it.
- And Facts, Updates, Back Stories and Future Stores sounded like information that could be tabs or subheads.
MO to extract
- In a world drowning in information, everyone needs to become an expert at providing information (visually and conceptually) about their information in order to make it more useful.
- Wait a minute; this is what many blogs, aggregation sites, social media tools and more are already doing…
