Terms of Simplicity

We’ve all heard how the proliferation of free news sources on the Web is threatening traditional forms of media, especially newspapers. We’ve also heard that if newspapers are to survive, they must adapt to the evolving trends in both how news is delivered, and how it is consumed. This may be why the SJ-R has recently run two articles written in the Frequently Asked Questions format that is so popular on Web sites.

Yesterday's article on the hiring scandal surrounding the governor’s administration and a previous article explaining CWLP’s proposed deal with the Sierra Club were both given the FAQ treatment.

It could be that the decision to run these stories in this manner was based on some feedback that the public wasn’t grasping the issues involved and so a more elementary approach to presenting the facts was employed. There may be some evidence that this is the case.

A recent statewide poll on the governor’s race recently showed that Blagojevich had a double digit lead over Topinka, despite the recent onslaught of negative press and the revelation of an ongoing federal investigation into his administration. Over on the Capital Fax Blog, two interesting schools of thought were offered in explaining these results: people don’t care about the investigation and lawsuits, or, they don’t really understand their significance. If a lot people really think that these stories are just typical election year mudslinging, then the SJ-R story in today’s paper might help explain to them what’s going on and why it does matter.

My personal reaction to the FAQ style of reporting a story is that it is fine for a sidebar, but that it comes across as somewhat remedial as a front page article. But I have to remember that not everyone has reading comprehension skills as advanced as my own. I was, after all, reading Plato in the original Latin when I was eight years old.*

All lying aside, I would hate to see newspapers go too far in adopting a Web style of writing in order to accommodate the online generation of news consumers.

In my career as a business writer, I’ve been involved in providing copy for Web sites. Studies have shown that people don’t tend to read Web sites, so much as scan them for the particular information that they are looking for. To facilitate these tendencies, good Web copy will be written in short paragraphs, with a lot of subheads and bullet points. This is good when you are searching for a company’s mailing address or hanging around myspace where most of the people are illiterate anyway, but it’s less effective when trying to comprehend a compelling story.

Granted, most people, myself included, don’t give the newspaper a thorough going-over either. The common approach is to scan headlines for articles of interest. But once I find an article of interest, I don’t just want the facts, I want that story. I want the reporter to explain it and put it into context. I want them to convey the proper emotion when appropriate, and to inject some style into the writing.

The FAQ style isn’t as extreme as simply publishing a bulleted-list of facts and I don’t mean to suggest that a radical shift of how stories are written is taking place. I can, however, certainly foresee a time when pull quotes are replaced with a short summary of key points summarizing a newspaper article. And perhaps, after readers have grown accustomed to merely reading the summaries, then narrative reporting will be relegated only to human interest stories.

It would be a shame if today’s increasingly fast-paced lifestyle led to the abridgement of the daily newspaper until all of the life was completely sapped from its pages.

Imagine if this famous passage:

Outlined against a blue, gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.

Was rendered for posterity as simply:

Notre Dame 13 Army 7

One advantage newspapers have over online news sources is that they can be and are at times read at length. While Web sites are surfed through quickly, people will spend quality time with a newspaper, whether it’s when curled up in bed on a Sunday morning, plopped down on a train for a long commute, or holed up in the office restroom for a long break. Let’s hope that newspaper publishers take advantage of this competitive advantage and don’t reduce the day’s events to a series of instant messages.

*I know, Plato was Greek. But did you know that Mickey Mouse had a gay dog?**

**A BFS T-shirt, should they ever become available, to the first person to identify the origin of that joke.