Driving a Newspaper
On the Data Highway

Home shopping? Movies on demand? What about information?

An earlier version of this article appeared in the January 1994 issue of Quill, a magazine published by the Society of Professional Journalists. Its title there was "Molding the Medium" (pp. 30-34). Please note that the article was written before I had used the Web, and I have not updated it substantially. The accompanying pages (listing related Web sites) are updated regularly.

When discussing the electronic newspaper of the future, people often concentrate on technological issues such as the method of delivery, hardware and security, and how they're going to integrate the advertising. What is rarely talked about is how it will look and how readers will interact with it. Among all the attention given to data highways, we hear very little about what shape a newspaper might take when it is traveling on them.

If you think you can dump the contents of today's edition onto the network and win subscribers, you're wrong. Paper is paper. A screen is something else. It isn't only that you can do different things on a screen. You must. Text on a screen is not newsprint, not a magazine, not a book.

In this document:

Think about footnotes.
Think about length restrictions.
How did I get here?
Keep the good, throw out the rest.
Blaze trails through the forest of information.
Bring along some design principles.
Encourage skimming and scanning.
Don't make it difficult.
Build a friendly interface.

Elsewhere:

Other articles about online newspapers
Other Web sites where you can find online newspapers, journalism resources, j-schools, and similar links

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Think about footnotes.

You can't use them in a newspaper format. Sometimes it would be nice if you could, but you work around the limitations of the form.

The electronic cousin of a footnote belongs to a way of presenting information called hypertext. In hypertext, words or phrases on the computer screen are highlighted in some way to let the reader know that he or she can get more information related to the given word or phrase. But the extra material does not appear unless the reader asks for it. The usual method is to click with a mouse on the highlighted word. Then a window filled with new text pops up on the screen. You'll find hypertext right here in this document, and all over the World Wide Web.

In addition to background information or further explanation about the word or phrase, a window can contain the previous day's story or a completely separate article. In a science story, for example, the link could lead to the article in the journal Nature that was the basis for the news story.

(This raises questions about copyright, of course; one of the hottest topics on the Internet is how copyright holders might be compensated.)

Think about length restrictions.

Sometimes a reporter or editor cuts a colorful quote or two to make room for background material, because a journalist must always assume that some readers come to the story without any knowledge of it. But all the readers who have been following the story every day miss out on whatever had to be cut. They skip the rehash. They may wish there were more new material.

Think about maps and graphics that a newspaper runs only once. Many of them have clear connections to subsequent stories, but only occasionally can a repeat appearance be justified, especially now when newsprint costs are making publishers call for smaller papers -- lower page counts.

In an electronic world, the news hole is nearly infinite. There are no newsprint expenses, no dead trees. And nothing need ever disappear. The whole system is a giant morgue (journalists' jargon for archives).

How did I get here?

One of the problems that handicaps current hypertext systems is that readers get lost. They make so many jumps away from the article they started reading, they can't find their way back. This shows how alluring the jumping can be, but the readers get very frustrated when they feel lost; they miss the control they are used to having with conventional printed media. Frustrated readers are likely to desert the medium.

(For real-life proof of the desertion syndrome, read up on videotex -- the primitive precursor to today's online services.)

Two simple ways to keep the reader oriented are based on familiar objects: the bookmark and the map. The reader can place an electronic bookmark anywhere in the current article. The reader can come back in a few minutes or next week. The "map" is usually rendered as a linear list rather than a treelike diagram with many branching paths (although that is also possible); it shows readers where they have been. They can click on a spot to return to it. (You may want to read more about creating hypertexts and the metaphors that may be useful in electronic information spaces.)

Other print conventions such as a table of contents and an index can be used in hypertext, but they are not always appropriate. In a newspaper-style environment, headlines (with larger type for more important stories, just like the print convention) and sections can be used as they are now. Some readers will always turn first to Metro and ignore Sports. Some will read nothing but the editorial page or the comics.

Keep the good, throw out the rest.

It will be difficult to keep what is good about newspapers and throw out or modify what doesn't work well in the new medium. Not everyone would agree with me that the convention of Page One is a great idea and should be retained (we could look at articles by communications scholars about the empowerment of readers and the end of tyranny in opinion-making); of course, no reader would ever be required to look at Page One (and that leads to a separate issue about the fragmentation of our society).

In designing electronic newspapers, some people might lean too strongly toward print conventions that should be let go in favor of new capabilities given us by the electronic medium.

Consider indexes. If I am trying to look up a fact in an almanac, I want an index. But the only time I use the index or key box of a newspaper is to find the classified ads. What about kinds of indexes that newspapers have never had? If I want to buy a new coat, I would like to see a list of all the ads for coat sales in that day's paper (or that week's) -- specifically, juniors' and women's coat sales.

If I want to find stories on a particular topic, however, I would not really need an index. I could define a search that located stories containing the words Arafat, Rabin and Jordan for any time period I selected. When the list of matches came up on my screen, I could see the headline and bank in their original font and size, the lead paragraph and the date. When I click on one that looks interesting, I get more of the story. A single entry might read "Arafat (10), Rabin (4), Jordan (1)" -- the numbers telling me how many times that word appears in that story -- and if my main interest is Jordan, then I know not to bother with it.

Through such searches, which are already available in many libraries' electronic card catalogs, readers can blaze their own trails through the online morgue ("trailblazing" through stored data is a concept originated by Vannevar Bush, an engineer and science adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, in the 1930s; Bush is considered the father of hypertext). But the invaluable service that journalistic expertise can provide is ready-made trails, via hypertext links.

Blaze trails through the forest of information.

Links could lead the reader back chronologically through all the stories a paper has run on President Clinton's health care plan, with side paths into related editorials and even letters from readers. Any news story with a long history can be vastly enhanced by means of attached maps, overviews from past editions and time lines.

Features on travel in Italy could be linked to articles about Renaissance art and features on Italian cuisine in the food section. (The long shelf life of travel, food and other "recreational" features would be a great asset to any newspaper with an online edition, supplemented by the linked cross-references; people all over the country might subscribe exclusively to a large daily's "leisure database.")

A key to making all this information easy to use is keeping the interface simple. The last thing readers want is a long index or menu at every juncture. They don't have to know exactly what they are going to get when they click on a highlighted phrase -- so long as it's relevant.

Because new copy pops up in a window that can be made to vanish with another click, it is simple and straightforward to click, look and decide based on the actual content, not an abstract. (But the relevance of the linked material must be readily apparent, or readers will quickly conclude that most links are pointless and give up on them.)

Bring along some design principles.

Newspaper people must not forget the importance of typography and layout design when they move into electronic information delivery. One of the worst things about videotex was the ugly, lumpy text. One of the great things about a broadsheet newspaper is how easy it is for the human eye to scan an entire page in seconds. Although the screen is different from the page, it is still a two-dimensional space. Many of the same rules apply.

The format we prefer for word processing is not the format we prefer for reading. A scrolling, continuous text is not ideal for hypertext, or for the channel-switching habits we have learned from TV, and it is at odds with the practice of reading a newspaper. Newspapers are better suited than books or even magazines for migration to electronic media because newspapers already operate with very compact blocks of text. (The basic elements that are linked together in hypertext are often referred to as "chunks.")

Encourage skimming and scanning.

Marshall McLuhan said electric speed was our future, and it is. This is not to say that we never want to slow down, but until we find something that interests us, we want to move very fast. Because we can scan headlines quickly and skim a lead paragraph, we can often "read" a whole daily newspaper in less than an hour. Forcing readers to scroll down to the end of one article before they can see the next one, or to look at the articles in a given sequence, even within a particular section, or to read a menu or index before they see any stories will only annoy them.

Mark Heyer described three ways of collecting information in an article in CD ROM: The New Papyrus (1986):

Hunting is the typical action of looking something up, when a person wants a specific kind of information about a specific topic and conducts a search for it. Hunting takes place in computerized databases today and also in libraries.
Browsing is a kind of searching without a specific end; it is what people do when they scan a daily newspaper, page through a magazine or flip channels on a TV set.
Grazing is the most passive of the three; Heyer gives as an example a TV viewer who turns on the set at seven o'clock and does not move or change stations until he turns the set off at midnight (some people do this with CNN).

An electronic newspaper can allow readers to do any of these three things and switch from one to another in an instant. An "autopilot mode" would flash headlines at a speed set by the reader (who might also set filters, such as "no sports" and "new since last Tuesday night"). If something looked interesting, the reader could press a button to stop the flow and read the entire story. At any point, the reader could look something up -- a difficult word, a map of a country, a story from last week or last year.

There is no system this versatile yet, no system perfectly suited to step in and take over from the comfortable, convenient hardcopy interface of a printed newspaper. But there could be.

Don't make it difficult.

The hard part will be making this easy to do. Color, borders and typography all can contribute to helping readers feel comfortable with the medium. But the physical device for interacting with the text also will play a large part. The simpler, the better.

To define searches, an alphanumeric keyboard is necessary, but most other functions can be handled with a pointing device such as a mouse.

Experts on user-interface design such as Ben Shneiderman and Brenda Laurel make it clear that the more people have to struggle to learn to use a system, the less likely they are to learn to use it well. Things that make learning a struggle rather than a pleasure include complex manuals and instructions, commands that are easy to forget, and being confronted by a screen that doesn't give you any idea what to do next.

Build a friendly interface.

Anyone who can read can pick up a newspaper and get something out of it. The interface is truly user-friendly. If the electronic newspaper is to be a mass medium, it has to be friendly too.

Friendly means that "help" systems must be truly helpful and tutorials should really teach from square one. Friendly means that no user should ever get stuck, not knowing how to proceed. Users should be able to search or browse at will, switching between the two modes. They should have suitable tools to help them find what they want when they go into hunting mode.

Friendly also means that real potential users (not insiders) must be brought into the design process from the beginning, not shown a nearly finished product when it is too late to make any big changes. The test users shouldn't be sophisticated folks collected by a slick focus-group company, either. Set up a kiosk in a mall. Get real people in there, and listen to what they want. Don't let a fast-talking expert show them how everything works, flashing functions past them on the screen like a high-speed slide show. Hand them the remote, sit back and say, "Go ahead, try it." Watch what gives them trouble. Record all their questions. Ask them what they want the thing to do, and how.

We could end up with data highways full of big smelly tractor-trailers (my impression of home shopping and pay-per-view movies) or small, quiet electric cars (cheap, clean and beneficial to everyone). The time to build the little cars is now, before the trucks own the road.

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