It represents the emergence of a new information ecosystem that will have a more profound impact on human civilisation than did the printing press.
(Al Gore, former US Vice-President, The Virtual Revolution, BBC2, 2010)
Tim Berners-Lee created a new way of allowing communication to work in extraordinarily connected ways.
(Stephen Fry, quoted in the Observer, 2010)
Since Tim Berners-Lee’s Hypertext system was first used in 1991, the World Wide Web has expanded at breathtaking speed, and is profoundly changing journalism. News outlets are converging so that distinctions between print, audio, TV and telephony, all delivered to a personal interactive screen, are becoming blurred.
TV and radio stations must now have an online presence to accompany and complement their broadcast services. (So do newspapers. Indeed, the growth of online consumption with portable devices like the iPad may one day eliminate the need for expensively produced printed papers being driven around the country in vans and pushed through your letterboxes by kids on bikes.) In TV and radio, the station’s online service has already become much more than an afterthought. It has a symbiotic relationship with the broadcasting, particularly with radio. Local radio stations, for example, now have instant response and feedback from listeners via message-posting, email and text – more than they ever got on the phone. They also have a new source of information. For example, if severe weather strikes your region, suddenly the radio station’s website becomes a support network, with listeners sharing their experiences, calling for help, and offering it. The newsroom now has a wealth of immediate information about what is happening, and can pick up human stories. It also provides a practical community service, which increases its audience and enhances listener loyalty.
The bigger network stations can offer much more in-depth analysis, with their correspondents providing background features on the website and, in many cases, blogging their observations and advice. Television news now has a massive source of immediate pictures and quite good quality video whenever a big story occurs. (BBC News has a special interactive section, with more than a dozen journalists checking and distributing to programme editors the thousands of pieces of information and pictures received from viewers, listeners and online readers every day.)
So it is essential for broadcasters to compete online with fast, trustworthy and attractive web versions of their news services, which offer opportunities for the audience to contribute. These online sites are effective and affordable only if the broadcast staff supply versions of their stories for the web as a matter of routine. When TV and radio journalists were first asked to do this by their managers, there was much grousing and grumping about extra work for no real purpose, other than to seem to be switched on to new media. The grousers have gone silent now, as they see how many younger people in particular use these online news services, and how they extend the reach of the journalism worldwide.
So the ability to write a web version of your story has become very important for most broadcast journalists. Some newsroom computer systems will allow you to put your text directly on to the site with a few clicks. Many journalists simply send their stories to a specialised editorial and technical team, who format the material. Audio, still pictures and streamed video are usually launched on to the site by specialists.
So is writing online news the same as writing for radio or television, or is it like writing for newspapers? Online news editors say that it is closer to print journalism than broadcasting, for the simple reason that people read most of the information, rather than hear it. Broadcast journalists who need to version their material for the web have to un-learn the techniques of writing the spoken word, and write print-English. But it is a special form of print. Consumers use it in a different way from a newspaper or a book. The screen is quite a small frame; it uses pictures a great deal, it is brightly coloured, and it is constantly inviting you to look at something else. Online news has to be written very sharply, very concisely, and very personally.
All the best practitioners agree that what makes online journalism stand out is the combination of lots of visual interest and very short sentences, with the text on the screen broken up.
For example, on a typical day with no outstanding news story, a major broadcaster’s website will have perhaps twenty-five stories headlined on the front page, ten of them with still pictures or video clips, and each with a summary of the story in less than twelve words. Click through to a story and each sentence will be laid out as a paragraph, and will be short and to the point.
When big stories happen, there’s an opportunity for lots of angles and background information, as well as the first-hand journalism. Here is part of the BBC News Online front page two days after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The main story, headlined ‘Race to help Haiti quake victims’, was a pull-together or overview written in London using the BBC’s own reports and agency material.
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are awaiting the start of a global rescue effort in the wake of the country’s devastating earthquake.
BBC correspondents say the situation is increasingly desperate, with no coordinated rescue plan so far and aid only trickling in.
The search for survivors continues but rescuers have little lifting equipment and are often using their bare hands.
Tens of thousands are feared dead and up to three million affected.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the disaster is ‘unimaginable’ and pledged long-term American assistance.
This central story went on to quote aid groups and UN peacekeepers on the ground, the UN’s Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs, the Head of Médecins du Monde, the British International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander, US President Barack Obama, and spokespeople from the US military, The World Bank, and the World Food Programme.
Prominently boxed was ‘At the Scene – BBC Correspondent Matthew Price’, with a click-through for his graphic first-hand account, headlined ‘Living sleep among dead at Haiti hospitals’ above ‘click to play’ for his TV report. The online story had clearly been rewritten for the web.
There is a body lying outside L’Hopital de la Paix in Port-au-Prince – but it is the sight that awaits you inside the hospital grounds that is most alarming.
It is as if a massacre has been perpetrated here.
Dirty white sheets cover some of the dead, others lie out in the open – some, their limbs entwined with another’s.
Many are the bodies of adults, but here to the right, a baby on her back, her belly bloated and pronounced.
She is wearing a silvery blue top – just lying by the curb, abandoned.
A man stirs to the left. He unfurls a blanket that covers the ground and lies back down. The living are sleeping among the dead.
As Price walks on into the hospital, there is more description than is required in the television commentary, with vivid details (he describes how the screams and whimpers echo down the corridors) and a series of personal stories.
A week later, the BBC Online site had fourteen background pieces and ten video reports from Haiti to choose from. Again, the eye-witness report was prominent, this time from correspondent Karen Allen:
[Headline] Uncertain Future for Haiti’s Amputees
[Picture of human example Emmanuel Etienne in hospital]
[First sentence in bold – almost like a second headline] Emmanuel Etienne may be badly injured in a field hospital set up on an old tennis court but he feels like a lucky man.
Doctors had planned to amputate his crushed leg after he was trapped in the rubble of a three-storey house but they have pumped him full of antibiotics and given him extra blood.
Now they have changed their minds. They can salvage the damaged limb after all.
For the 22-year-old, an avid football fan, his odds at returning to a relatively normal life have just improved dramatically.
‘I was terrified I was going to lose my leg,’ he says. [This quote is also featured separately in a box]
‘It’s hard enough in Haiti having both of them let alone just one – I don’t think I would have lived very long.’
It is estimated that some 2,000 people have had limbs amputated as a result of the earthquake. [etc.]
As the miraculous internet developed in the ’90s, the BBC took a strategic decision to invest in this new information network. If the BBC was to be the most trusted and most popular source of broadcast news at home and around the world for many years to come, it would need to have the best online news service in Europe. Mike Smartt, an experienced radio and TV journalist, became Editor-in-Chief and was influential in shaping the way the content for this new medium was written. Here he outlines some of the principles of writing effectively for online news services.
I think it’s a combination of writing for broadcast and for print. It’s written for the eye so it has to be read like a newspaper, but it’s a little more pithy. It’s more personal, like radio; more like talking to an individual. It’s deciding what’s the most arresting and interesting aspect of a story, putting it at the top, then writing it an interesting way.
Analogies with newspapers are quite striking. If you walk into the BBC Online newsroom, you will see a similar set-up to a newspaper. We have subs; we have chief-subs; we have reporters (we call them broadcast journalists), and we have assistant editors – the people who construct the front pages of each of the different sites, such as the international and UK versions, and the specialist sites on health, education and so on. Almost all the people we employ have at some point been newspaper or magazine journalists. We target them. Then we have to teach them the tasks that a broadcast-journalist faces, so that they can handle audio and video.
Smartt draws parallels with continuous radio or television news channels. But whereas there is less writing in 24-hour broadcasting because so much of it is live, web journalism demands more writing.
The big difference between online and a newspaper, which may be published once a day with several editions, is that online news is a 24-hour process. You are perpetually updating. There is no such thing as a deadline. The deadline is when you press the button and it goes off to the server. You may do that again with an update three or four minutes later. To keep track of what you have written is quite difficult. We often find stories with repetitions at the bottom because they have been updated at the top, but the writer hasn’t looked lower down to see if there is duplication. Very often the difficulty is in deciding when you have to completely deconstruct or reconstruct the story and start again rather than writing a quick update.
It’s a new kind of journalism. The writer has to understand the website as a whole. The story he or she is working on may just be one of a number of stories on the same subject. The main story and the sidebars have to complement each other, and you have to know how to link to other angles, the archive or outside sources.
Mike Smartt and his colleagues and competitors were among the early news online pioneers. Now the web has become much more competitive, is technically faster and has enormous capacity. At the time of writing, the Editor of BBC News Online is Steve Herrmann. He says one of the most challenging aspects of working in online news is to be both quick and comprehensive.
Speed really matters because your reader is only a click away from a myriad of other news sources, and with the growth of social media, the rate at which news – or indeed rumour – can spread has got even faster. Of course that still doesn’t mean that you don’t first have to be right!
At the same time, the almost unlimited capacity to provide explanation, additional content, angles, depth and well-chosen external links is a major strength of online journalism. It’s also a challenge. On a major story, you are in effect becoming an editor as well as a writer as you assemble around your own story the best collection of links, associated content, pictures, graphics, video and audio. The ability to tie together multiple angles of the story from various sources so that people can make sense of them quickly and easily – even as the story is unfolding – is a key part of the job.
Aminda Leigh has been writing news and features in English for European websites for several years. She emphasises the importance of refreshing the material.
It’s vital to update a developing story, even if it means just altering the headline and the top line. When writing breaking headlines for news tickers, it’s especially important to synthesise the facts into one simple phrase encapsulating the new element. Once you have uploaded the headline ticker, you must immediately refresh the actual story.
And everything must be easy to read.
Research shows that many internet users shy away from reading long articles. Make sure the key points of your story are near the top of your text. If your story has a lot of material, break it up into linked items on separate pages, with links for more in-depth information.
All online editors say that, with nearly everyone now able to access the web via broadband, the journalism must contain pictures, video or audio to enhance the text as much as possible. We know that a picture is worth a thousand words (or, as Napoleon said, ‘a good sketch is better than a long speech’), but a website picture that is not clearly captioned can cause confusion. Every picture must have a punchy but informative caption that doesn’t describe the image, but may answer some of the time-honoured questions: who? why? when? where? what?
Here Aminda Leigh gives us her top ten tips for successful internet journalism.
1. Keep it short and sweet. People don’t have the attention span to read screeds of material and they often don’t like scrolling down pages and pages of text. If you have a long article, split it up with linked headings at the top, to allow readers to jump directly to the relevant part of the story.
2. Insert plenty of breaks in your text. Readers can be daunted by great chunks of writing. I tend to put one main idea in each paragraph.
3. Put the story in the top line (though not necessarily in the headline – that should be a teaser to get the audience to click on your story). The main facts must be easy to find.
4. Keep your sentences clear and simple. Complex phrases with lots of sub-clauses are difficult to understand. And avoid needless repetition.
5. Use language that can be understood by everyone, bearing in mind that your material is likely to be read by an international audience.
6. Use bullet-points for stories with detailed facts or figures. For example, on a story about changes to the tax system, instead of writing a lengthy description of the changes, a bulleted list would be a clearer way to get the information across.
7. Highlight pertinent information. This obviously depends on your website style, but the internet is a visual medium, so to make important things in the text stand out, I tend to use bold as a way of emphasising. Don’t just highlight one word, highlight the pertinent phrase.
8. Link to other pages. The beauty of the internet is that you don’t have to put all your information into the main article. Additional information or background can be written separately with clear links.
9. Links to pages outside your site should open in another page, so that your site is still open and ready to be surfed again.
10. Check spelling and punctuation very carefully before you put your material online. Remember that automatic spellcheckers won’t necessarily pick up mistakes caused by sloppy typing (for example, writing ‘form’ instead of ‘from’). Read through every word, and always look at your work once again after you have put it online to see if there are any problems with HTML, links that don’t work, etc. Any mistakes should be corrected immediately. You soon lose credibility if your online work is inaccurate or sloppy.
It’s clear that all broadcast journalists must develop the ability to create a web version of their story quickly and confidently. Some may spend periods of time, or at least a full shift, at the specialist online desk. Being able to write a great deal during a normal shift, without losing concentration, is one of the special skills required of an online journalist. Working under this kind of pressure, internet journalists should all have ready access to written style guides, as newspaper journalists do, for quick reference on spelling, punctuation and formatting, for consistency and for accuracy.
Providing broadcast stories for the website may not be enough in the future. News to mobile phones and other devices is a huge growth area. In some parts of the world, such as Nigeria, it is now the dominant way in which people receive their news. It requires an even stricter discipline of brevity and clarity. The BBC’s Steve Herrmann says:
The big growth in the use of mobile devices to access news and much more besides means we have new opportunities to present and package our journalism. Much of the same logic applies – writing for the eye and the small screen means keeping it brief, clear and direct and using short sentences and paragraphs. But as these devices evolve, so will people’s habits and preferences. A good online journalist will spot how technology is changing the way people want to get their news and work out how to evolve the way we do things.
More and more people seem to be getting at least some of their news and information from blogs and tweets. While much of this international traffic is personal or non-journalistic, the institutions have embraced the new information networks with enthusiasm. No self-respecting government minister or European Commissioner would retain credibility without a regular blog! Advertising agencies plant messages on Twitter.
For broadcast newsrooms, these new communication channels need serious consideration. Many well known correspondents and presenters have blogs. Some broadcasters put out stories on Twitter (which is currently limited to 140 characters at a time, so can be little more than a headline and a plea to go to the website). The emerging writing style of blogs is as informal and chatty as possible. It tends to be more personal. But all blogging journalists must make sure they don’t drop their guard as they chat away at the end of a long, hard day’s broadcasting. A blog is publication. As the BBC’s guidelines say on this point, while encouraging their journalists to write informally on their blogs: ‘We’ve stressed that there is still a framework of editorial standards they must work within…. Our news blogs are checked by a second journalist before publication.’