An editorial in the Guardian Unlimited has some interesting things to say, but says them in a way almost useless to online readers.
Here's the beginning of the editorial, re-paragraphed for reading on a computer screen: A wing and a prayer. (I know, it's a hackneyed title—another problem with the editorial.)
The decomposing body of the swan washed in and out with the tide in Cellardyke Harbour for several days.
After a while, seagulls started to feed off it. Children played on the beach beside it.
On March 29, several days after it was first sighted, it was reported to the authorities, but too late for the now rotten remains to be collected that day. There was a delay for the weekend.
By Wednesday, nervousness in government circles was reflected in a meeting of Cobra, the government's emergency planning arm. But not until Thursday April 6 was it announced that the bird, a mute swan, was infected with the deadly H5N1 strain. Bird flu had arrived in Britain.
It might be the first paragraph of a thriller, with a synopsis proposing hundreds of thousands of deaths, mass graves, a worldwide human and economic catastrophe. But, with luck there is still time to write our own ending.
Now click through and read the original editorial...if you can. It's three long, indigestible lumps of text that online readers would skim without really understanding—or simply ignore altogether.
This is what I call "paragraphosis"—a display of text in a form totally unsuited to this medium. It happens often when text designed for print is dumped on a website. After more than a decade of trying to study how we read online, I'm not surprised, but it's frustrating when one of the best online papers in the world still does it.
I swapped some email about this recently with a local journalist whose blog displays his excellent columns in a similarly unreadable form. He understood my point, but clearly regarded the blog as just a text dump. His real readers are those who buy his paper.
The editors at the Guardian no doubt know how many thousands read their print version, and chances are their online visitors are a small fraction of the print readership. So it may not be worth the trouble to revise an editorial like this for the convenience of a few freeloading web surfers. (I subscribe to the Guardian Weekly, and expect to read this same editorial on paper tomorrow morning.)
But if anything is worth publishing online, it's worth publishing properly, so that we freeloaders will be as informed as everyone else. If it's something as intelligent and thoughtful as a Guardian editorial, on a critical issue like H5N1, it should be readable, and read, by as many people as possible.
For a more web-smart treatment of the same issue, look at this story in The Independent: short paragraphs and lots of boldface subheads.
