Writing for the Web

The link war rages on

Scott Rosenberg at Wordyard.com has written In Defense of Links, Part One: Nick Carr, hypertext and delinkification. It's a fascinating and carefully reasoned argument, and I'm looking forward to Part Two. Here's the intro; go read the whole thing.

For 15 years, I’ve been doing most of my writing — aside from my two books — on the Web. When I do switch back to writing an article for print, I find myself feeling stymied. I can’t link! 

Links have become an essential part of how I write, and also part of how I read. Given a choice between reading something on paper and reading it online, I much prefer reading online: I can follow up on an article’s links to explore source material, gain a deeper understanding of a complex point, or just look up some term of art with which I’m unfamiliar. 

There is, I think, nothing unusual about this today. So I was flummoxed earlier this year when Nicholas Carr started a campaign against the humble link, and found at least partial support from some other estimable writers (among them Laura Miller, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jason Fry and Ryan Chittum).

Should bloggers have control over ads that appear next to their content?

Via TheNextWeb.com: Should bloggers have control over ads that appear next to their content? Excerpt, then a comment:.

Given the collective bargaining power needed to amass ad dollars, many popular independent bloggers have handed over their sidebars and headers to large blog networks, trusting them to seek out advertisers in return for a percentage of revenue. The larger networks can sometimes contain hundreds of bloggers and sell access to their blogs as packaged deals, meaning a single ad will be displayed across dozens of blogs within a network. 

In most cases, this is ideal for the blogger because he can focus on creating content without having to waste time chasing down advertisers. 

But occasionally this can lead to an ad placement with which the blogger doesn’t agree, and this is when controversy erupts. 

Take, for instance, the Scienceblogs network, which faced a revolt from over a dozen of its own bloggers a few weeks ago when it decided to launch a corporate blog sponsored by Pepsi. 

The blog — since taken down — resembled all the other blogs on the network and was aggregated alongside them in its main news feed. Perhaps most outrageously, the corporate-penned posts were being indexed in Google News, which has a high bar of entry for what news sources it allows. 

The science bloggers were not happy that their journalistic integrity had been compromised so haphazardly. “The major problem wasn’t necessarily that an advertorial went up, it was that [Seed Media]” — the company that owns Scienceblogs — “didn’t give us any indication of what was going on,” Brian Switek told me in a phone interview. 

Switek is a science writer who left the network in protest of the Pepsi decision. “All of a sudden we have this new blog that’s entirely run by Pepsi staff and overseen by Pepsi with no editorial oversight from Scienceblogs.” 

For Switek, the incident chipped into the “general credibility that Scienceblogs has tried to create since its inception in terms of inviting people with great science writing with integrity who aren’t shills for certain companies.” 

He alleged that Seed knew ahead of time that its bloggers wouldn’t like the campaign, and that’s why it didn’t give any warning and ultimately was so slow to respond to the outrage. 

But despite this lack of transparency, the science blogger admired the fact that Seed didn’t attempt to censor any of the backlash. “For all my other criticisms, I really have to credit Seed with not editing any of the criticism, not taking it down, not telling us that we can’t make those comments.”

I followed this dispute with interest and some anxiety. I often think about putting Google ads on my sites, and then I think about what might turn up. So I chicken out and run only ads for some of my books, and for The Tyee, an online magazine that I contribute a lot to.

It really does boil down to credibility. My major blog is H5N1, on a subject about which I can't claim to be an expert. All I can do is choose sources and experts who do seem to have some credibility, and leave it at that. If ads for belly-fat reduction, or worse yet homeopathic bird-flu cures, started to pop up on my site, I'd cringe.

If I could control the ads (without spending all my time drumming up business), it might be different. But I can't, so I run only the ads you see here.

Yglesias: Get a blog!

US political blogger Matthew Yglesias writes: Get a Blog! He comments on how print-oriented student publications are, and then writes:

If you’re in school today and think you might want to be a writer some day, you need to really focus on the fact that future labor market opportunities in the realm of writing are going to be overwhelmingly focused on hypertext. 

That doesn’t mean everyone will be writing blogs like mine. There are lots of different things on the Web, including some stuff that’s a bit newspaperesque in its use of hard news ledes and the rest. But even online formats that somewhat resemble print formats are different, and involve different skills and different kinds of deadline pressures.

CJR reviews The Yahoo Style Guide

Via the Columbia Journalism Review: The Write Stuff, a review of The Yahoo Style Guide. Excerpt:

One of the most interesting things about the guide is that it exists at all. Why does the free and open Web need a Fortune 500 multinational to clarify whether Midwest should be capitalized (yes, when referring to the center of the U.S.) or when to use the exclamation point (sparingly)? 

And why should bloggers, hyperlocal reporters, and online newsletter editors turn to Yahoo when the company has already been eclipsed by Google in search? 

The answer, or part of it, is that Yahoo’s content business remains impressively robust, with fifty-six million unique users visiting Yahoo News in June 2010, the company says, citing comScore figures. And Chris Barr, Yahoo’s senior editorial director and the book’s editor, argues that the guide is intended to “raise the level of writing on the Web”—something Yahoo feels the AP hasn’t tackled. 

“The AP guide is the bible of the newspaper industry. We wanted to address the rest of the world that the AP doesn’t deal with.” 

The editors make their priorities clear early on. When writing for the Web, they favor short over long, simple over complex, consistency over laxity. 

“Online audiences expect far more information, in much less space, in far less time, than ever before,” the preface says. “Attention spans are short, and every pixel counts.” 

Thus, as early as the fourth page of the guide, Yahoo reproduces a diagram from an eye-tracking study showing how online readers flit across a computer screen and rapidly size up headlines, photos and other cues to decide whether to click or flee. 

In admonitory boldface, editors warn that “your content has a few seconds—three or less! —to encourage people to read more…” (So much for that advice on superfluous exclamation points.)

Six classic American magazine stories reimagined for the digital age

Via Plog: Six classic American magazine stories reimagined for the digital age. Excerpt:

Earlier this week, a list of some of the best magazine stories of all time bounced its way around Twitter, paying tribute to some of literary journalism's pioneers, including Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

Of course, those kinds of stories -- thousands of words meticulously placed after dozens of hours of reporting, eagerly lapped up by a much-less-harried reading public -- are fewer and farther between these days (although they certainly still happen.)

That got us thinking: What would some of those stories look like if they were written today?

We picked six of our favorites, and reworked them for today's audiences. Should you be bored, you're encouraged to rework your own favorites in the comments.

"Superman Comes to the Supermarket," by Norman Mailer. Esquire, 1960

What it Was: Part psycho-analysis of a country, part political dispatch, Mailer's story about the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles is Esquire's most famous piece of political reporting.

What it Would Look Like Today: A list, destined to be eviscerated by commenters on Digg: "LA. Still Sucks, and 9 Other Things I Learned at the DNC."

Defining Webwriting

I posted a lot of articles when I started this blog back in 2003. Here's one of them: Defining Webwriting. Excerpt:

François Hubert, who runs the excellent French-language site Cortexte, is planning to teach a course in Webwriting and wants to offer his students a definition of the subject. Did I have one?

Well, that was a good question. I didn't want to spoil it with a quick answer. So after some thought, here's a tentative definition:

Webwriting is good writing adapted to the limits of the Web as a medium and to the needs of Web users.

OK, that's the one-liner. Now let me expand on what I just said. "Good writing," by my definition, is plain text that does not usually call attention to itself. Orwell called it "transparent writing," text that lets you see the subject without even noticing the words that convey it.

In fact, if you notice the elegant style, the similes as aromatic as fried shoes, the stuttering staccato of alliteration, then it's not good writing. It's just the writer showing off how cool he thinks he is.

This is a philosophy of writing, not a scientific law, and if your idea of literary heaven is mainlining on the high-calorie prose of Cormac McCarthy, I wish you every joy of him. But I aspire to Orwell's clarity.

J-School grads finding some work in webwriting

Via the Pew Research Center, a downbeat report: Journalism Jobs Harder to Find. Excerpt:

Yet for all the troubling news, the study's authors did identify a few encouraging signs, such as an increase in the number of 2009 graduates working with the internet, a central component of modern journalism.

Fully 58.2% of the recent bachelor graduates with communication jobs reported being involved with Web writing and editing, a substantial increase from 50.6%, the year before.

"Given that digital activities are certainly a key part of communication work," the report concluded, "the suggestion is that the quality of the jobs the 2009 graduates took, on average, was at least slightly higher than had been true for the 2008 graduates."

When it came to the students' assessments of their college educations, the results were mixed. A majority of graduates (58.3%) said they were satisfied with the way school had prepared them for communication jobs.

But 41.7% said they either hadn't been properly prepared or weren't sure. In addition, 42.5% said they felt that they hadn't acquired certain key skills necessary for real-world success -- mainly in new digital technologies and job seeking strategies.