If you’re an online news
consumer, you already know what a blurb is, or you know it when you see it, even
if you don’t have the vocabulary to name it. Here’s an example from a recent
homepage of The New York Times.
The board of
Merrill Lynch announced that E. Stanley O’Neal would retire immediately and
Alberto Cribiore would serve as nonexecutive chairman.
To understand the role of the
blurb, or summary, as some online journalists refer to the device, you have to
see what comes on top of it: a hyperlinked headline.
Merrill Chooses
Interim Leader, Begins Search for C.E.O.
The board of
Merrill Lynch announced that E. Stanley O’Neal would retire immediately and
Alberto Cribiore would serve as nonexecutive chairman.
Blurbs are
designed to drive readers to the story. They are words that click. In that way,
they are combination of newswriting and marketing. Like so many online forms,
they have their historical roots in earlier times and technologies.
Until the
advent of the World Wide Web, blurbs were usually found only on book jackets or
movie posters. Their origins
are generally attributed to Gelett Burgess, an American humorist; in 1907, he
created a fictitious character, “Miss Belinda Blurb,” to say nice things about
his new book.
Old-style blurbs
were a marketing device that heaped excessive praise on a book. Often they were
written by friends of the author, who then returned the favor. An imaginary example:
— Gustave
Flaubert
novel you have to read this summer, “Madame Bovary” is it!
— Charles
Dickens
Online blurbs
serve the same function: They are intended to keep readers reading by
engaging their interest enough to click the headline, taking them to the full
story.
Their use is
widespread, according to Poynter’s 2003 Eyetrack study, “Online
News Behavior in the Age of Multimedia.”
“The vast majority of news Web sites’ homepages,” the study found, “use a combination of headlines and
accompanying blurbs to entice site visitors to click through to stories.”
Here are examples.
From
England, the online edition
of The Guardian:
Last
updated six minutes ago
Spanish court hands prison sentences of nearly 40,000 years each
to three of eight lead defendants in 2004 terror attack case.
From the Los Angeles Times:
Last L.A. 8 defendants cleared
By Henry
Weinstein | 6:00 a.m.
After
20 years, U.S. drops charges against men accused of ties to
terrorists.
From Russia, a blurb
drives readers to the story of a bombing in a central Russian city, killing eight, injuring about 50:
В
Тольятти взорвался рейсовый автобус. Погибли 8 человек, более 50 пострадали.
Мощность бомбы составила 2 килограмма в тротиловом эквиваленте. Возбуждено
уголовное дело п статье “терроризм”.
And, closer to home, from Poynter
Online:
What Does a ‘Data Delivery Editor’ Do?
By Ken Sands
At The Roanoke Times,
he turns a variety of databases into easy-to-use online content.
Some
news organizations use the term “summary” instead of blurb — a reasonable
choice, I’d say, as the item sums up what readers will find when they click on the
linked headline on top. That’s the case at nytimes.com.
To learn more about this
device, I did an email interview with Jill Agostino, news editor of nytimes.com.
Agostino will be teaching in
my new
seminar, “Online Writing: Words that Click,” Jan. 27-30, 2008. She’ll be joined by Becky Bowers, a St.
Petersburg Times copy editor turned graphic reporter, and other specialists in
online writing. The seminar is geared to reporters, editors, online producers and other
journalists who write and edit for print, broadcast and online-only news sites.
The application deadline is Dec. 17.
Q: How do you decide what online story gets a blurb on the homepage?
A: Those are news judgments. Generally, the stories we deem most important
are the ones that get summaries, and the next most important stories get
headlines under “more news.”
MORE NEWS
Economy Grew 3.9% in 3rd Quarter 35 minutes
ago
Baseball’s Drug
Testing Lacks Element of Surprise
Myanmar Monks
Said to March Again 5:10 AM ET
Bomb on Russian
Bus Kills at Least 8 7:00 AM ET
Rangel Offering
Broad Tax Plan, and Big Target
At night, we will follow the paper’s A1
(page) to some extent, but it also depends on what time news is breaking. We
may have a summary for a story that the paper has played inside; maybe some of
the other stories they have on A1 we’ve had up since 11 in the morning — for
our readers it’s sort of old news. I talk with the homepage producer at night
about them.
Q: What length
do you shoot for?
A: Usually no more than three lines. (The
article template allows us to know exactly how many lines it will come out to
as we write it.) We tell people that you usually don’t want to them to be more
than 23 to 25 words (which comes out to roughly three lines), but obviously
there are exceptions.
Q: A recent
summary reads like a lead, but one shorter than the lead of the actual story.
The Federal Reserve today approved a
half-percentage point cut in its discount rate on loans to banks, saying that
it now feels that “tighter credit and increased uncertainty have the
potential to restrain economic growth going forward.” Stocks immediately
surged when trading opened.
Is that
deliberate?
A: Often, the lead of the story can act as
a guide for the summary.
Q: What
guidelines, besides length, do you rely on?
A: We don’t really have hard and fast rules
on these things, aside from the obvious ones: They have to make sense, be
grammatically correct and accurately reflect the story. We have done some
training sessions with the producers, and I try to point out things to the
producers at night, but it obviously depends on how busy we are.
Q: Is the
blurb/summary an online creation? Is there an analog in the print edition?
A: There really isn’t anything that is like
this in the print edition But, remember, they can look at the headline and
immediately read the lead of the story right under it — our readers have to
take an extra step and click through the headline. Hopefully the summary
entices them to do so.
