Urgency in news values

News editors undervalue the urgency of developing stories

It's Saturday 24 July 2010 and a minor news item catches my eye. North Korea has threatened nuclear war. Remember the date: it could be the beginning of the end of the planet. Of course, it may not be. North Korea threatens nuclear war quite a lot.

This is the dilemma for news editors around the world. It is probably more than the posturing of a tinpot dictator: the US and South Korea have begun a military exercise that pours ships and planes into North Korea's field of view. They are doing this specifically in response to North Korea's hostile actions (including the sinking of a South Korean ship).

UK news websites valued the threat of nuclear war below 
less urgent stories that were closer to home

But it could be something and nothing. How are to we to put a value on this news? How are we to decide its prominence?

The serious UK news websites valued it as story number three. Pretty important, but not as important as:

• a review into the way child-murderer John Venables was supervised after his release
• a US senator urging Scottish ministers to come to a hearing on the release of the Lockerbie bomber
• a claim that safety procedures in the run-up to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster had been ignored
• the exposure of secret government plans to scrap the schools admission code

I had a little chuckle that possible nuclear war was being treated so lightly but then I looked more closely. None of these more important stories had any urgency attached. My life would not be much different if I had found out these things a week later. Nuclear war -- even a casual cry-wolf threat of one -- is something I need to know about now, I would suggest. There are consequences to leaving that one for another day.

Easy to miss the threat of nuclear war in the NYT site

Then I looked at the New York Times, expecting it to have done better. But no. The end of the world ranked lower than a story about an ex-president's daughter's wedding.

Maybe I am being old fashioned, but I would have done things differently. It is a sad trait of modern journalism that we are so driven by the imperative to entertain, we put things our readers are interested in above things they urgently need to know.

I would value urgency more highly, even if I am having to interest my reader in things they do not naturally care about. It's a duty thing.  Duty is not a word you hear much in journalism these days. But if the planet is blown up and no-one knew because they were too enthralled by Chelsea Clinton's wedding arrangements, I would be a bit embarrassed to be a news editor.

The BBC's cool news redesign

Web design is coming of age. Although it has received much criticism, the redesign of the BBC News website shows a detailed understanding of how people actually use news on the web. The whingers probably just need to get used to the new look and then they well start to discover how clever it is.

The useability of the BBC News website is the subject of a post on my new blog: Grow Your Own Website.

Context is king

This page tells web writers to explain to their readers the benefit of reading on. By including context, writers can do their jobs better and so become extremely rich.

I used to tell people that web design was more like setting up a museum than publishing a magazine. Clear simple navigation was vital so that you could find your way around the exhibits.

Today, it's different. A website is still a bit like a museum but one where, rather than coming through the front door, people arrive and depart at random points via particle-matter transporter. Search has changed the way we communicate for ever. Web developers have to contend with people beaming in and out of their content at a whim.

The matter-transport-museum analogy is a strange way of looking at things but it sort of works. Your audience arrives dazed and confused, their molecules having reassembled only nanoseconds before and they look around blinking, trying to figure out where in the world they are. They may have arrived in a back bedroom in Cincinnati where a Jim Pigeon wants to show them his collection of late twentieth century spoons.  They may have arrived at the plush offices of an intergallactic technology consortium which wants to dazzle them with binary gadgets. They may have arrived literally at a museum (well virtually literally).

This means two things:

• Every bejewelled trinket box we put on display must speak for itself. We can no longer assume people are following the audio tour. Almost no-one is any more. Most visit for that one arcane exhibit and then leave immediately.
• If our visitor arrives and is baffled about where they are in the universe, they don't spend long trying to work it out. Why would they? The matter-transporter can take them to infinitely more places at the click of a button than they will ever have time to visit. The world of Google is too exciting to pause long in a dull backwater.

It is not obvious who some websites are intended for or 
how anyone would benefit from visiting. 
Try the FSA for example.

It also means that good websites are no longer designed from the top down -- they are grown from the ground up. Each page one creates has to answer the following questions:

• Who do I want to be reading this?
• If they read it, what do they get out of it? How do they benefit? Why should they bother?
• What am I trying to achieve? What do I want my reader to do differently as a result of the thing I have created?
• How can I let my reader know quickly that this is for them and that they will find it valuable? By quickly, I mean the time it takes their molecules to reassemble (15 nanoseconds maybe).

I have been asked to review a number of websites for people recently. Easily the commonest problem is lack of context. As a visitor, the creators expect me to put in too much effort working out what they are about. Individual pages don't explain themselves and so the effect is that the whole site becomes a confusing place to be.

The writer's voice

It has become fashionable for writers to have a voice but I am not convinced this is a good thing.* Writers are, by nature, peculiar people and you get more than enough of their eccentricities in the selection of material and posing of questions. We don't need their impressions or interpretations or, heaven forbid, feelings. We want those things from the people actually fighting the war or running the country or inventing the optical network devices.

I wrote this rant in an email response to my friend Roy who had forwarded a competent article by someone else and asked what I thought of their style. The piece was a hastily cobbled together hack, generated from a lot of  half remembered earlier interviews. Light on sources; heavy on chat. All too common and, in my view, a mutated form of churnalism driven by modern journalism’s demands on time and cost. It is part of humanity’s futile attempt to fill the infinite void of the internet. Two trillion pages and counting. Most of it junk. As you can tell, I hated it.

I am a hypocrite. Many of my favourite writers have a definite voice, and they are the better for it. Much of my own writing has a voice and too few sources. Obviously, I think I have something to add.

But my preference remains a feature which is mostly quotes from authoritative sources with the lightest possible touch from the writer to steer them into making a point.

theVOICE

BBC 2’s Culture Show last week included a review by novelist Geoff Dyer of recent war books. His point was that we seem to be coming to terms with the truths of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through factual writing rather than fiction.** He picked out Sebastian Junger’s War for particular praise. Junger writes about the experiences of American soldiers with whom he was embedded. One of the things Dyer liked was that Junger himself was absent from the narrative. The voices were all those of the soldiers. Dyer seemed to believe this was something astonishing and new. I was thinking: this is just good journalism.

The internet has dragged writing style a long way in just a few years. Personal experience writing has become ubiquitous thanks to blogs and cheap journalism.  The scary thing is that it has become a default to the extent that some have forgotten the multiple-source quote piece is even an option.

I suppose some people would take the view that they want to know a little about the writer so they can make their own judgment about the angle they take and the spin they may be applying. They have quickly got used to finding their own multiple sources on any subject. They are making ruthless and sudden decisions about any one piece of writing so they can move on to the next. It helps this kind of reader to be told what the writer thinks because it speeds up the formation of their own views.

But accepting that some form of voice or personalisation is useful (and I am not sure I do) does not remove the need for multiple authoritative sources. The thing is that credibility is at least as big a problem in modern communication as the need for the reader to deal with a huge volume of information.

A media guru speaks:

I think writing style is important in journalism but secondary to the collection of authoritative facts. For me, a style which makes the source of those facts transparent to the reader is a boon in this info-overload age. Any advantage that writing with your own voice might provide can mostly be better achieved with clearly delineated opinion panels, dummy's guides, and so on.

An approach I like is the BBC's where they sometimes put an opinion box in a news story. This helps readers form a view about the meaning or impact of the news without devaluing the factual part of the story. It seems to me to get the best of both worlds without devaluing the underlying journalism.

We need to think more carefully about where journalism is going because it has never been more important for factual writing to be good. Really good.

Matthew Lynn writing in Business Week predicts the failure of the pay wall recently erected around The Times and Sunday Times.

It’s too late to start charging for newspapers online now. The content isn’t good enough, he says. Even British highbrow newspapers have placed too little emphasis on substance, and too much on entertaining and exciting their readers.

And yet, if the content is not sufficiently good that people will pay, where lies the future for journalists?

* Note that this piece has been written in the first person using a ‘voice’. The irony is not lost on me. Nor should it be on you.
** By the time you read this, the Culture Show’s Dyer review may have disappeared from the BBC iPlayer. Its tenor is reflected in this Sydney Morning Herald piece on an earlier talk by Dyer.

Resources for web writers and editors

A list of resources useful for web writers and editors who are getting more involved with the technical side of web site development. The list is by no means exhaustive. If you have any site or service you wish to add please let me know by adding a comment.

Design

Demonstration of the power of CSS: CSS Zen Garden
Design and emotion: Don Normal at TED Talks (video)
Taking your talent to the web -- entire book on web design from Jeffrey Zeldman in PDF format
40 examples of minimalism in web design
21 amazing CSS techniques you should know 

Accessibility

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Accessibility tools from Accessify

The web explained at Wikipedia

Web 2.0
HTML
ECMAScript (JavaScript)
Core fonts
The semantic web
Web application frameworks
Application programming interface

Technology

HTML Tutorial from W3Schools
HTML5 and what it offers
Whois.net domain name look up
A list of content management systems (CMS): Wikipedia
Help in selecting a content management system at CMS Review
The Flash Explained blog contains tutorials on Flash animation for websites

Search engine optimisation

Google Webmaster Central
SEO tools from WebConfs
Design for Google: fun demo of SEO techniques
Google Adwords key word tool
Google Trends allows you to compare the number of people searching on different terms
Small business guide to SEO
SEO for websites that rely on Flash
Google's Matt Cutts' Blog
SEO page assessment tool
Inside Google’s Brain: How PageRank And Indexing Work
Redirect check tool
How Google works -- slide show
SEO strategies for Facebook pages

Web analytics

Google Analytics
What all the terms mean: definitions
Wikipedia explains web analytics
Analytics toolbox from Mashable: 50+ ways to track website traffic
Google Analytics: 24 features that make it best of breed.
Standards and metrics for ABCe audited sites

Web use

How users read on the web from Jakob Nielsen
Alertbox: Jakob Nielsen's site on useability
How readers scan web pages
Google's eyetracking studies
US Government site on useability

Useful Firefox addons

Web Developer adds site developer tools to the Firefox Browser
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page
Adblock Plus removes adverts from web pages
Better Privacy blocks Flash tracking cookies and other nasties
With ColorZilla eyedropper you can get a colour reading from any point in your browser, and paste it into another program

Other

A List Apart Magazine explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
W3Schools provides excellent tutorials on the technlogy behind websites
The web is us/ing us -- interesting YouTube video exploring Web 2.0
The Wayback Machine keeps an archive of old versions of websites
A completely unscientific look at social sites (fun)

Tools

Wordle lets you create word clouds from any text
How to embed almost anything in your website
Net2ftp - a web based FTP client (poss for uploading pages to a server)
CushyCMS is a free system that lets you add user-editable pages to your site
Build an RSS feed you can cut and paste into your website with FeedJ2S
Blastacasta adds feeds to your website
Rotating content tool
SquareSpace: recommended website building tool
Favicon creater
Podomatic is a podcast creation and sharing service
Audioboo is a podcast creation and sharing service with an iPhone app
Posterous is a free blog that allows you to post by smart phone or email and automatically forwards to social media accounts
Coveritlive is a sophisticated live blogging tool
Aviary is a suite of online tools for image editing, illustration and audio editing
Slideshare lets you upload and share powerpoint presentations

Site validation

Accessiblity
Cascading Style Sheets
HTML
Feeds
Links
Speed
 

Stats

Alexa: traffic metrics, search analytics for websites
How many people are using each of the main browsers?
Which screen resolution displays are people using?

Libel reform stalls

Changes to no-win no-fee rules for libel lawyers have first been delayed by back-bench MPs and now dropped as parliament winds up business before the election.

Claimants can sue for libel without having to pay a lawyer, provided the lawyer thinks they have a good chance of winning. If they do win, the other side pays the lawyers costs and the claimant collects the damages with no financial risk. The lawyers take the risk, but they benefit from an uplift fee if they win.

Currently, libel lawyers can double their fees if they win a no-win no-fee case. This can mean defendents paying costs disproportionate to the defamation they have caused. Some libel lawyers charge £500 an hour. With the uplift fee, a defendant might be paying £1000 an hour.

Damages in a libel action are typically a few tens of thousands of pounds. Costs are often ten times that level.Costs in English libel courts are 140 times the European average a study by Oxford University found last year.

The Ministry of Justice was changing the libel law to reduce the uplift fee from 100% to 10% extra. That legislation has been set aside now and only time will tell whether the next government will restart libel cost reform.

Straw libel reform

Campaigners for libel reform were jubilant on Tuesday when Jack Straw announced changes to the law which may come into effect after the election.

But there were some important omissions from the announcement:

NO commitment to change the burden of proof to match other areas of law. Defendants will still have to prove the truth of their stories rather than claimants proving falsity.

NO expansion of the fair comment defence.

NO cap on damages or fees

NO low cost libel tribunal (my favourite Libel Reform Campaign proposal).

NO Exempting large companies from using the libel law

Although a commitment from the government to change the libel law is welcome, it is possible to interpret the announcement as being distinctly half-hearted.

YES there is a commitment to move away from the multiple publication rule so that publishers can only be used once. However, this is not new and one of the options being considered in the Justice Ministry's consultation paper is extending the one year period in which people can sue, possibly giving them as long as 10 years.

YES there is a commitment to a statutory public interest defence to protect investigative reports and similar. But what will it look like. This could be an excellent thing. It could mean no more than codifying the public interest (Reynolds) defence which already exists in common law.

NO there is actually no commitment to change the law to prevent libel tourism, although Jack Straw has said he will ask the Civil Procedure Rule Committee to consider tightening the rules where the court’s permission is required to serve defamation cases outside England and Wales. As far as I can see, this will only have a peripheral effect. It would not, for example have prevented Roman Polanski from suing Vanity Fair. Would it have stopped Cameron Diaz from suing the National Enquirer?

Opposition to libel reform is gearing up and it will be significant. Already the proposal to change the fees lawyers can charge in no-win no-fee cases has come under fire. The problem with Jack Straw's announcement is that it leaves him a lot of room for manoeuvre.

Jack Straw's rhetoric was impressive. His commitments less so. If we are going to reform libel, let's start with something more ambitious than this.


Links on libel reform:

Ministry of Justice announcement.
Report of the libel working group (PDF)
Press Gazette: Libel Reform Bill to achieve 'fair balance' in libel
Guardian: Libel reform bill to tackle 'libel tourism'
Guardian:Government to 'end abuse' of UK libel laws
Guardian:Lawyers threaten to seek judicial review over cuts in libel fees
Libel Reform Campaign's report
Libel Reform Campaign's response to Jack Straw's announcement
The Lawyer: Allen Green asks "Is libel reform now really possible?"
NoodleMaz's account of the Libel Reform Lobby on 23 March