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•Introduction
•The nature of formats
•How new formats come to be
•The state of creative formats on the web today
•The next wave of format
Formats for coherence
Formats for diversity
Formats for navigation
Formats for flux
Formats for ubiquity
Formats for identifying origins
•Conclusion
| Key
to Links: * Green links link to other sites used as examples * Red links link to parenthetical points by this author * Yellow links link to general reference * Orange links link to documents on other websites |
The nature of formats
Formats are the grammars through which creative artists and journalists (verbal and visual) can quickly and effectively make sense of the world. Formats are often denigrated as "genres" and "formulas" (which are indeed kinds of formats) but they play a pivotal role in making media meaningful and viable.
For example, the newspaper as we know it, could not exist without such conventional formats as these:
A really good introduction to journalism formats was developed by the New York Times for campus online publications. Click here for the overview. In the following paragraphs, all the links lead to relevant parts of the New York Times series.
The "nut graf": the familiar paragraph ("graf") containing the kernel ("nut") of most significant information. This format is so well established that many people believe that its "who, what, when, where, and why" structure represents the essence of newspaper writing.The chief virtue of nut grafs is their speed — the way they quickly focus the attention of journalists, editors and readers on the essentials of a story. If newspaper writers and readers were as unhurried today as they were in, say, the 1830s, then there would be far fewer nut grafs in newspapers.
The "soft lede": an easy-to-write form of anecdote, generally one or two paragraphs long, that provides an accessible, "human-faced" entry point into a complex piece of news.
The headline and subhead --- highly stylized formats, often created on the copy desk, that cue readers to the key facts that will influence whether or not they read a particular article.
The picture caption --- a format invented in 1886 by French photographer Paul Nader(1). Captions are often the first part of a news story people read; they welcome us into the story in a way that photographs, alone, could not; by identifying what important people and places look like.
The narrow column (making it easier to read long stories), the classified ad, and many more. The purpose of such formats is not to create deathless journalism. By establishing stylistic conventions they eliminate the number of decisions that have to be made; thus reducing the cost and increase the speed of "good-enough" newspapering. They allow any half-decent reporter to observe an event at 4 PM, turn in a story about it over the phone to an editor at 7 PM, and know that it can appear in the next morning’s paper, on a reasonably small budget.
Other formats that people know well in our time include the hour and half-hour television time slot, the "front-of-the-book" and the "back-of-the-book" sections of most magazines, the reaction shot in cinema, and the "gutter" (the white space between panels) in a comic strip. All of these foster mass production in media, in the same way that the assembly line and other techniques of "scientific management" fostered mass production of manufactured goods. Without such formats (and many more), mass media would be too expensive to produce. For example, if television "show runners" had to constantly invent new time-slot formats - if they had the theatrical playwright's range of choices for production length, from skit to one-act-play to three-hour drama with intermission -- they could never produce on a weekly basis. Audiences, too, need formats for their own convenience. New technologies like TIVO may allow you to capture television programs in the order you desire, but they cannot do away with the half-hour and hour-long time slot. Audiences need those formats to make sense of the otherwise chaotic flood of images and salespitches across the tube.
One reason why the Napster controversy has sparked such visceral response is that it challenges the familiar formats that package recorded music. The compact disk with 45 minutes of music and two or three hit singles by a recording group is a format derived from the vinyl "long-playing album" of years gone by. Napster renders that format irrelevant and replaces it with a format built around single songs, passed along through a community of listeners. Other pop music formats will probably survive Napster; these include the verse-solo-refrain-verse song format, the stereo mix, and (as broadcaster/writer Adam Curry noted recently in his own web-article on "formats"), the radio-mix genres like "album-oriented rock" and "country-rock" that dictate, with computer control, the flow of music and disk jockey patter on the air.
Curry goes further, to argue that formats are the critical "magic element" in all consumer products and services. "McDonalds has a great fast food format, closely replicated by Burger King," he writes, "but never quite the same, and judging from their burgers, they both provide similar content, butÉ their burgers contain scriptable formats, differing in order, elements and textureÉ I view the creation and maintenance (tweaking) of formats as a creative talent, one that must be backed up by experience, knowledge, research and close interaction with the audience."
Formats, in other words, comprise the real "secret sauce" that makes a brand a brand. And yet, formats, like secret formulas, cannot be copyrighted. To keep them proprietary, they must be carefully hidden, as McDonalds and CocaCola have tried to do. It will be much more difficult to maintain that secrecy on the web, where formats tend to become ubiquitous, because they only have value when they are universal or evocative enough to become second nature. If the New York Times web-site is the only site to offer a button for articles in "printer-friendly format" (with all the text on one page), then the format is almost worthless. But if hundreds of online sites adopt the convention, it becomes extremely valuable --- indeed, people will look for it when they enter a new site, and complain (or feel deprived) when they don't find it.