After being presented with a wonderful story from our intern, (interns, it seems are the only people with time on their hands) and then spending 2 hours coding up inline css to help make it a more pleasant reading experience, I was again reminded that our current template isn’t working well for longer articles. Said more eloquently, our presentation is inhibiting the long-form magazine-style reading experience.
I’ve wanted to address this issue for some time now. And I just so happen to have read a few interesting opinions on the subject of long-form writing for the web. 1: Whether it’s a good investment of time or not – and 2: What’s required to pull it off in an effective, well-presented format.
Starting off, a post from David Sleight, Deputy Creative Director of BusinessWeek.com expounded on the topic:
“You can’t do long-form writing online.”
“Really? It’s 2009 and we’re still having this conversation?”
And this morning a link from Harvard’s Nieman Reports website pointed to a Christian Science Monitor article titled: Why Journalists Deserve Low Pay.
A juicy nugget about presentation in that article:
“Effective presentation involves the ability to reduce information to its core to meet space and time requirements and presenting it in an interesting and attractive manner. These are built on linguistic and artistic skills and formatting techniques.”
Back to WHY this kind of writing is important, I’ll pull a quote from Gerald Marzorati’s keynote address at the 2009 CASE Editors’ Forum:
We crave stories – all cultures do – but we also crave facts. Lots of facts. And facts are more compelling, easier to digest, when arranged narratively.
…this sort of magazine writing is stuff that the people who do it take very seriously, and they take it seriously for one reason, in the end – to engage you, the reader. The bet is that the narratives they so carefully construct draw you in, get you hooked, get you to identify with people and places, keep you there to the end. Pieces like the ones I’ve briefly described may take up to an hour, or more, for you to finish. They require a lot of you. The payoff is that the facts you learn in the reading of such pieces stay with you, nudge your understanding of the world a little. I worry that this experience will not survive in the Information Technology Age. I am not at all sure you want to or can stick with pieces like this reading on a smart phone.
In the end, what we all want to do is DIFFERENTIATE. Tossing up press releases on your homepage is a lame, impotent strategy to support that goal. Quoting again from the CSmonitor article:
“Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.”
It’s silly to hang on to that system of doing things. It’s a sinking ship. The challenge I’ve yet to accept as a designer/developer is to craft better, more appealing ways to present and package online stories. To give long-form writing an online house it deserves.
All this research and quoting of articles is meaningless of course, unless I um, start doing something about it.
Back to David Sleight’s post for a pre-design pep talk:
Bottom line? It’s a bald fallacy of presumption to hold that presenting text on a webpage ipso facto induces peripatetic behavior in your audience. The content itself, and the design used to present it, are the leading factors in shaping success. Not pixels or points. The hands that matter are those of the writer and the designer. If you’re a Web designer, you have incredible power (and a responsibility) to help further the case for this medium.
May 25th, 2009 at 10:29 am
As someone who occasionally finds himself on Salon, Slate, or BBC Magazine, reading for half an hour about something fascinating, I do believe there is room for the long form on the web.
Unfortunately, not every example of it is up to those standards. (And I have to admit, I only read Salon & Slate quite rarely – when I stumble across them, rather than being a regular visitor)
I suspect my threshold for reading a long piece on the web is higher: It needs to be better than its paper equivalent for me to engage with it. But then, boy, do I engage: I follow links, look up things on Google and Wikipedia, and can easily spend two or three hours following various side tracks and stories across the web, angling from one bit of fascination to the next. I remember spending hours (a few years ago) reading about the things that happened to Evita’s corpse, then embalming, then Lenin, then Peron and Argentinian politics, with various little diversions along the way.(Wikipedia, it has to be said, is magnificent for this sort of thing)
We’re now having feature articles (usually 500-2000 words) on our student portal – they are, as yet, a far cry from what I envision them to be in future. We are slowly finding our feet with them, but it’s a learning process. I hope they are getting better, over time. But there is only so much time we can dedicate to sourcing and writing them, amongst many other more pressing tasks…
May 26th, 2009 at 10:26 am
Yes, couldn’t agree more, long form is really important on the web (although I don’t think I’ve yet come up with a satisfactory format for it)
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:31 am
Long-form web writing? That’s an oxymoron — no?
Actually, I think it the magazine style of writing (and presentation) is important. And it’s sorely missing from the web, especially in it’s finest form (as Robert points out). I also tend to read longish on the web, if it’s well written and takes advantage of the medium.
But magazine style doesn’t necessarily imply magazine length, as we’ve come know it in print. In print, the definition of long is finite — space is limited. On the web, long is infinite. So, what do we mean by long on the web?
June 3rd, 2009 at 8:52 am
I, too, struggle with this problem. When trying to integrate our magazine with web, my temptation is to suggest to our magazine editors to put a full-length feature on the web and a highly edited version with references to the web version throughout. It seems to me in an era of tight budgets and environmental considerations, longer stories on the web would be logical, except for that gnawing voice that says people won’t read long form on the web. However, I think this notion is experiencing challenge with the demise of so many newspapers and magazines (and making me more comfortable in defending the position to nay-sayers). Won’t audiences adjust and accept long form on the web as a natural outcome of change (because where else will they find it)?
George’s comment in the previous post brings up an equally important issue to presentation, also addressed in Christian Science Monitor quote. With infinite space, what will be the journalistic standard for boiling information to its core?