Say Goodbye To Ye Olde Editorial Process

What’s Formatting?

In print journalism, things are done a certain way, have been for decades. Editors and writers haggle over what’s important, choose an order and a placement for the stories. The Associated Press publishes a book’s worth of guidelines, dictating everything frm abbreviations to punctuation to how numbers are to be presented.

Never begin a sentence with a numeral, spell it out; spell out numbers less than 10.

The structure of an article is also crucial, born from the logistics of wire services and the method by which people read the newspaper.

The most important information goes first; details are filled in later.

This is called the inverted news pyramid. It works on paper because people tend to skim the headlines and the leads (ledes). The rules of writing for print are so numerous that no self-respecting editor, unless he’s memorized the whole of the tradition, is caught without a copy of the AP Stylebook on his desk.

I have a copy – in storage. I work on the Internet, where the rules are changing, and they’re changing because the needs and habits of the audience are changing.

 
Nobody Ever Asks About The Language — Stephen King

Some rules will be the same, though usability expert Jakob Nielsen acknowledges what all writers have to learn: passive voice sucks. It’s too slow and confusing. Writers should use active voice as often as possible so the reader can run through without tripping.

Following in the crotchety footsteps of William Strunk, Nielsen says:

[I]t’s usually better to write a positive statement ("do X") than a negative statement ("avoid Y"), and it’s almost always horrible to use double negatives ("avoid not doing X").

Nielsen also says beginning a sentence with a numeral is not only acceptable, but preferable to online readers scanning the page. But then he refers to something much more interesting: the information scent.

Information scent refers to the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website.

The scent is caught within the first 2 to 3 words (the first two to three words), as readers scan information in an F-shaped pattern. It is because of the information scent that Nielsen reverses himself:

Active voice is best for most Web content, but using passive voice can let you front-load important keywords in headings, blurbs, and lead sentences. This enhances scannability and thus SEO effectiveness.

Traditional editors reading this may ask, "For what kind of effectiveness?" This may be a matter judgment, though, and not necessarily a hard and fast rule, but passive voice can help readers find the information scent in the search results, where titles and blurbs or ledes appear.

It depends on the situation, of course. Maybe your initial headline reads "Reindeer mauls Santa Claus," but if you want the information scent to begin with Santa – if optimizing for "Santa" in the SERPs – you might want to rearrange to "Santa Claus mauled by reindeer."

The most important words – "Santa," "Claus," and "mauled" come to the foreground.        

 
Move Over Editors, The Readers Want Your Jobs

It’s not only the language that’s changing, but also the editorial process. Dave Winer, the one who brought us RSS and, arguably, blogging, has been tinkering with the New York Times RSS feed to develop what he calls the New York Times "river."

Winer hasn’t settled yet on the best way to deliver, either by keyword, outline, or chronology, but what he’s developing is definitely a way around the traditional editor’s choice of what’s important. The "river" displays article headlines and blurbs from the Times in text only, organized by the reader’s preference.

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg notes how Winer’s river takes the editorial process and ordering right out of the equation:

The reader who looks at Times River and says “this is how I want my news” is a reader who is saying to the Times editors, “Don’t waste all that time figuring out what to tell me you think is important.”

As Winer put it, “They [editors] have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking.”

At the University of Kentucky’s College of Communications and Information Studies, we often said, "The media doesn’t tell you what to think, just what to think about." This seems to be what Winer is bent on fixing.

There’s a lot more to this, but this is a Web article and most stopped reading 500 words ago. Too bad for them. They’ll miss a link to my Essentials of Font Philosophy article, a bit of a dirge for the serif fonts. (Hint: Only use sans-serif online; it reads faster.)

It’s no secret to anybody that the print industry is in dire straits.  Newspapers are suffering heavily.  The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, posted a 5% drop in advertising revenue in their first quarter of 2007.  Gannet Company Inc., owner of USA Today, and the New York Times Company both posted a 3% drop in national advertising revenue.  This is all according to the most recent quarterly reports filed with the SEC.

Part of the reason why this is happening, is, of course, because it’s so much easier to buy an ad online through an automated system.  The other reason is because a good chunk of online media is competitively priced through an auction and comes with better performance tracking than a newspaper ad.  When newspaper publishers determine the value of their ads, it has nothing to do with either the market value or the ads’ performance—it has to do with the dreaded rate card.  But we advertisers can rejoice, for soon the rate card will be no more.

Do not weep for the rate card, for it has enjoyed a long and prosperous life, arbitrarily  plundering from advertisers without providing any meaningful value.  And don’t for a minute think that it will go quietly.

Google is helping the newspapers sell ads, by making it easy for small advertisers to buy space via their automated system and applying the competitive, auction-based pricing model.  And yet, despite the dire straits they’re in, some newspaper publishers are disgruntled at the help they’re getting.  In a New York Times article earlier this month, the SVP of Strategy and Development at the Chicago Tribune bristled at the low rates that advertisers were bidding, accusing them of having an eBay mentality.

The traditional definition of chutzpah is when someone kills his parents and then pleads for mercy because he’s only a poor orphan.  This is worse.  This is like Lois Lane stabbing Superman in the back with a shard of kryptonite as he rescues her from a burning building.  If advertisers have an eBay mentality, it’s because what publishers are offering is as valuable as something on eBay.

More than anything else, I think there’s a psychological issue at play here. The newspapers, and offline publishers in general, are afraid that they’re going to lose power.  These media despots have been lords of the realm for a long time, too long if you ask me.  Now there is a viable alternative, and they’re so used to calling the shots that they can’t realize what’s happening to them.  It is only a matter of time before advertisers demand that they set the prices, and the newspapers won’t be able to call upon the rate card to bail them out.

Personally, I think newspapers have reason to be optimistic.  Once they let the rate card go, and let the market set the price, they might be able to create innovative services that would make them even more money than the rate card could ever dream of.  It’ll be like dumping an overbearing, manipulative boyfriend or girlfriend – once they get over it, a whole new world of possibilities will open up. 

For example, if the paper could marry a user’s online site behavior with his or her offline delivery address, advertisers could well bid very high prices for the chance to target behavioral segments with inserts.  If I log on to the New York Times online and look for Manhattan real estate, and the Times can marry that behavior with my delivery address, I bet there are hundreds of realtors that would love to show me an ad about an open house.  In this way, the death knell of the rate card could start to make newspapers and magazines look healthy again.