As newspapers struggle to keep readers, they often trumpet ambitious coverage on the front page. “Starting today: A six-part series!” “Special 12-page section inside!” One prominent editor proclaimed his wish that his paper publish every known fact about Sept. 11.
We journalists often assume that more is the answer, when I suspect that what many readers secretly want is less.
In their book, “The Attention Economy,” Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck point out that one edition of the Sunday New York Times contains more factual information than all the written material available to a reader in the 15th century.
Being well-informed is a much bigger job than it used to be. It’s an effort, and it’s relentless. Smart journalists try to make it seem less so.
Online journalists have been busily reconceiving the form of journalism with an emphasis on how news is actually used by readers of the new medium. Wise print journalists make “usability” a guiding principle, too.
Coping with ubiquitous, voluminous media is one of the central tasks of modern life, says Todd Gitlin in “Media Unlimited.” Today people live with a low-level media buzz, print and electronic, from the time they rise in the morning to the moment they go to bed.
The natural reaction to media overload is a kind of filtering that most people do without thinking. The threshold to capture their attention drifts higher and higher. TV becomes background. Newspapers become optional, flip-through diversions.
Hard numbers support the assertions of Davenport, Beck, and Gitlin. According to the Pew Research Center, a mere 41 percent of adults in 2002 read a newspaper the day before, compared with 47 percent in 2000 and 58 percent in 1994.
No wonder newspapers are being tuned out. The contemporary paper takes more commitment than most readers want to give. The average large weekday paper can take up to three hours to read, cover to cover, while the average newspaper reader spends just 22 minutes (less than 14 for the reader under 35), according to the Readership Institute at Northwestern University. The less readers read, the weaker our hold on them.
The challenge — to make reading news easier and more appealing — is not a small one: Text is the hardest format we give readers. It is potentially the most precise — and perhaps even the most satisfying. But reading text is essentially unnatural. Nobody is born knowing how. Even when we get good at it, reading text requires letter-by-letter, word-by-word translation by the brain. It’s work. Human beings naturally gravitate to easier forms; “War and Peace,” the movie, seems more manageable than “War and Peace,” the novel. Poynter’s Eyes on the News study (1991) showed that newspaper photos and graphics were “read,” or absorbed, at a rate seven to eight times higher than text. Visuals are simply easier.
According to the Readership Institute, “Making a newspaper ‘easy to read’ is the single highest potential area for growing readership.” How can we make news content look easier, more scannable, less a part of the numbing cacophony of the daily media barrage?
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• Make sure every story has a clear focus that is relevant to readers. At the planning stage, ask why readers should care, and use the answer to shape the story idea into something that compels. Before writing or visual work begins, distill every story idea into a single thesis sentence and share it with everyone — writers, editors, visual journalists, copy editors — who’ll work on the story. This ensures all the conspicuous elements of the story speak to each other and to readers. If the surface elements (headlines, cutlines, visuals) speak clearly to them, readers will have a head start on the text. That means they are less likely to be intimidated by it.
• Avoid extraneous elements, and that includes the most visible stuff. Avoid needless typographical contrasts, design frou-frou, repetitive photo layouts, vacuous illustrations and fact-as-fetish graphics. Streamline visuals as well as text. Train readers to expect meaning in every mark on the page.
• Train the staff to write short and edit mercilessly. Depth doesn’t necessarily require length. Witness USA Today, a paper whose ruthlessly edited format may be ridiculed by journalists but whose circulation numbers are among the few U.S. newspapers that have climbed in recent years.
