Page 80 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

WRITING FOR THE WEB

anyone pushing rules of style on them. They are their own editors, and
this situation leads to a looser style.
The second force promoting a change in writing style is multime-
dia. In the past, journalists wrote for one branch of journalism at a
time. Broadcast journalists use different rules than print journalists for
writing. Within broadcast and print journalism there are many subdi-
visions of style.
The exciting thing about the flexibility of the Web is that all types
of media can come together, or converge. Print, still images, sound,
moving pictures, and animation can all be used to tell the same story
in a way that wasn’t possible before the advent of the Web. This new
reality creates a need for people who are comfortable working with
many writing styles simultaneously. It also opens avenues for jour-
nalists to create new ways of writing and storytelling.
The critical eye of readers on the Web is the third force reshaping
journalistic writing on the Web. It impacts everyone, from The New
York Times to the most obscure blog, and is a result of the Web’s
interactive nature. The Web is interactive not in the way a video game
70 is, but more like the ways in which people interact at a café in a close-
knit neighborhood. This interactivity allows people to communicate
with unprecedented speed and reach. There is a constant electronic
conversation going on that has turned journalism into a two-way street,
and changed the way writers approach their craft.

Traditional News Writing and the Web

An eye-tracking study done in 2000 (the Stanford Poynter Project; see
http://www.poynterextra.org/et/i.htm for the full study) examined the
ways in which people viewed Web pages. The majority of the subjects
in their study viewed text first, not photos or graphics, which might
have seemed more logical. Jakob Nielsen, who The New York Times
once called “the guru of webpage usability,” found similar use issues in
his studies. These findings make it very clear that text is as important
(if not more important) as any other part of a Web site.
The basis for all news writing is the inverted pyramid, with its man-
date to put the most important information at the top of a printed
story. News writers are required to answer the who, what, where,
when, how, and why very early in the story, leaving the fine details and
background for later. On the Web it is no different. In fact, it’s more
important to produce compact and to-the-point stories.