Link: A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages) | yelvington.com.
Great post here, and an interesting frame for thinking about these issues. Not many mention the CNN.com topic pages (which came out with the redesign launched in 2007)... maybe folks aren't thinking about them because they are less well executed (I don't know if they are or are not, this is a newer genre that owes more to blog "carnivals" than anything else), or because they appeared BEFORE all this talk about topic pages caught fire...)
Anyway, it means approaching the informational side of journalism from OUTSIDE the frame of the inverted pyramid and more actually as technical writers. Isn't that interesting?! Summaries that give context. Unbound, decontextualized content that assumes the hypertextual link is the norm, rather than linear thinking and reading and linking. Fascinating!
What I think we may really, finally be seeing is the true modification of journalism and journalistic discourse for the Web medium, rather than doing the horseless carriage jive, the way early TV looked so much like an old time radio program, only with pictures.
Marshall McLuhan would be proud.
A tale of two audiences (and beatblogging and topics pages)
Everybody is different from everybody else, and there are lots of ways to group people. But when looking at the audience of a newspaper website, there's one way that I continue to find compelling -- and troubling.
When we group users by frequency, we get something like this:
Our news websites tend to have a huge reach. This is the cumulative monthly unique-user count that we all like to brag about. It's the number newspapers tout when they claim they've grown total audience when print and web users are combined.
But this big reach is made up mostly of occasional users -- once, twice a month. Many come from search engines. Many aren't in the target market at all. And since advertising requires repetition to be effective, these folks don't constitute a very attractive audience from an economic perspective.
There's a much, much smaller component that's radically different from the big group. These are the loyal users, the people who come not once or twice, but 20, 30, 50 or even hundreds of times a month.
[...]
Many people still read home-delivered print (more than you might think). Print readership isn't directly measurable, but there are plenty of research tools that all report a decline in frequency -- and along with it, engagement with civic life.
On the Web, there's no home delivery -- you have to take an action to visit a website. The results are directly measurable, and painful to look at.
This isn't 1956, but we still typically write like Dwight Eisenhower is president.
That isn't a bad thing for everybody, but it fails for many.
[Heh. Great line!]
For the people in the small "loyal user" circle, it actually works pretty well. News stories tend to report incremental advances in an underlying tale that unfolds slowly, over time. If you're following along, the incremental story makes perfect sense. You might want more depth, more detail, but you won't want to be told what you already know. You won't want the background.
The problem is with the occasional user, for whom the incremental story may seem to be just so much monkey screech.
[...]
The topics page is the piece that offers the greatest opportunity to connect with the big circle.
Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too.
Done poorly -- and I've looked recently at some topics pages that would curl my hair, if I had enough left to curl -- a topics page leaves both loyal and occasional users with one of those "WTF" moments.
The biggest dangers come from these sources:
- 1. Lack of a synopis that makes sense. Some sites don't even both writing a synopsis. Others seem to have assigned the work to interns from the marketing department.
- 2. Misplaced trust in automation. I found a USA Today topics page about the BBC. A bot had assembled it. Every oblique mention of the BBC was churned up. The page made no sense at all. If I want to run a search, I'll go to Google, thank you.
- 3. Inflexible formatting. A format or template should be a starting point, not an ending point. If your community has an awesome hip-hop culture, your hip-hop page should be awesome and hip-hop.
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