CNN understands how users read text better than print people do

Posted by on . 3 comments.

Well sort of.

One of the features many people may have noticed with the relaunch of CNN.com earlier this year is that CNN offers succinct bullet points above articles about the key points of the story. Most people skim stories anyway, so why not give them the ultimate way to skim an article? Maybe they will read the whole thing, but use the bullet points to help them remember key points.

 The current top story at CNN.com is ”FBI: Bomb threats force stores to wire money.” Next to the headline on the story page you’ll find:

Story Highlights

  • NEW: Law enforcement source: At least $13,000 has been extorted
  • FBI suspects extortion scam is based overseas; calls traced outside U.S.
  • Stores, banks in 12 states have received bomb threat calls demanding money
  • Caller says money must be electronically transferred or bomb will go off

There is also an in-depth story, map of where the bomb threats were made and related links. All good stuff for sure, but the idea of putting bullet points with a story is so simple, yet so ingenious.

It’s something that any publication can do right now with minimal effort. Just ask your writers or editors to come up with a few key bullet points for the Web to go with each story, especially for longer, more complicated stories. In many ways it is Web centric, and it’s much easier to do than adding video, blogs, talk back and other sexier features.

Craig Stoltz said it well:

I’d say it’s ironic that a broadcast Web site understands how to present news to an electronic user better than newspaper publishers that pay for serious reporting and news analysis. 

But it’s not.

If newspapers took a cue from CNN’s packaging, and topped their full reports with easily skimmable summaries, they’d have the best of both worlds: Important, original news that carries out the vital functions of the Fourth Estate–and reaches the maximum audience. 

Newspapers know that people skim stories, so I am not sure why others haven’t adopted this approach. Perhaps there would be too much blow-back from a paper like The New York Times. Writers might feel it cheapens their writing.

But in the end, it’s the user that matters most. I think giving people key take home points above every story (unless it’s a really short brief) is just plain common sense. And it’s the kind of easy to add feature that users will love.

Isn’t that  a win-win?

  • Marc Matteo

    Except in my newsroom there’s *immense* pushback on anything that adds minutes to “the workflow”. Nor, frankly, is there a way in the multi-kazillion-dollar print publishing system to add this information so that would push it down from the writer/editor level to the “web uploader” level and those guys are under-paid, over-worked and didn’t write the story in the first place, and now they’ll have to *read* each story… and now we’re adding even MORE time to “the workflow”.

    I don’t deny it’s a good idea, I’m illustrating a larger problem. Most newspapers are so entrenched in their ways, both operationally and _financially_ that a lot of the changes that we advocate simply can not happen.

    Other companies, the Googles and the Craig’s Lists, don’t have this problem.

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  • http://www.patthorntonfiles.com pat

    Marc,

    I totally agree with you. I work for a newspaper, and I know exactly how hard it is to institute a simple change like this. At my paper this simple change would be virtually impossible to implement, because of our publishing system and work flow.

    The No. 1 problem is that most newspapers have invested heavily in systems that are print focused (Team Base, Hermes, some sort of Quark or InDesign system, etc). Those systems put content very poorly onto the Web, and often don’t give the flexibility to create Web centric content. Until that that changes, most newspapers will put out incredibly print-centric Web sites, and will have no one but themselves to blame when they are getting killed on the Web.

    CNN can easily get around this problem because its written content is intended for the Web first. So, there engine for displaying written content is based around a Web model.

    I disagree that the changes can not happen. I know they won’t, but where there is a will, there is a way. At small papers like the Lawrence Journal World, they have been able to do great things with their Web product. It’s all of matter of understanding that the Web is your future.

    Most papers simply don’t get that one fundamental truth.