Battling with the assumptions and prejudices of journalists in his role as a journalism trainer, Online Journalism Review editor Robert Niles picks out three particular misconceptions that, he says, need to be unpicked and relearned.
Detail is good: Focusing on the long tailiness of the web, Niles says the first of these is the idea that you can't be too detailed or you will lose the audience. He uses football and politics as examples of subjects where fans have an endless appetite for minutiae and feel insulted by writing that tries to re-explain the basics. When background detail is needed, hyperlinks can do the talking.
"Housing Bubble Blog doesn't spend time explaining the alphabet soup of SIV, HELOC and ARM. And that hasn't kept the site from attracting tens of thousands of readers a day. Don't lose your topic's most informed and loyal readers by slowing down the narrative with elementary explanations."
Attention spans are not the issue: It's competition for time that is the battle, and news sites now compete for web users' time against the rest of the web - Facebook, MySpace, eBay, Amazon, Marks and Spencer shopping and everything else.
"If your content is not grabbing an audience, don't blame attention spans. Blame your inability to stand out in a crowded marketplace. There's simply too much good stuff out there for publications to get away with vapid reports."
Get the figures right: Plenty of people get obsessive about tracking sports results, fantasy sports teams or how many calories they should be eating at each meal.
"Who says that those same readers can't handle a story about war profiteering in Iraq? Or incarceration rates within various communities? Put the numbers within those stories in a context from readers' personal lives, and they will understand better the scale of data you're reporting."
The bottom line is that there is a proven audience for long-form journalism (what investigative reporter David Leigh might call slow journalism), so our audience "is not the collection of attention-challenged simpletons that too many of us have assumed it to be". That means, according to Niles, writing with authority and contextualising complex information so that it becomes relevant to readers' lives.
To my next point...
Source: Online Journalism Review
