Comments on: Writing the novel, then the CliffsNotes

By: Why Not Aggregate Yourself?

Why Not Aggregate Yourself? — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:30:14 +0000

[...] behind the “balloon boy” stunt). But rather than just leave the 2,000 word story, it also created its own shorter bullet-point version, which is likely what it would have written up if the original story had been published elsewhere. [...]

By: Matt Mireles

Matt Mireles — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:38:50 +0000

Important point: Gawker did this. Not NYT. Not WaPo. Not anyone from the old school. They get it in a way that the dinosaurs don’t, and probably won’t until it’s too late.

All that said, you’re spot on with your analysis, Josh. And overall, I like the emphasis you place in this blog on user interface and user experience for the news reader. Hearing/reading you write about it makes it seem obvious, but clearly it’s not so obvious to everyone else. Kudos.

By: Meanwhile over at Nieman Lab… – Nieman Storyboard - A project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:50:15 +0000

[...] Benton has a post about online narratives at our sister site, the Nieman Journalism Lab. Here’s an excerpt from it, describing a story [...]

By: Martha Nichols

Martha Nichols — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:23:23 +0000

Wonderful idea, and from Gawker yet. This gives hope and a way around how to extend magazine features online. So how long can the original feature run before total screen fatigue? (Or even print fatigue?) Would this work for 5,000 words?

By: albert

albert — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:13:00 +0000

Definitely smart. I often go to read what looks like an interesting story, see that it runs to seven more pages and then file it away to read later and end up forgetting about it all together because I’ve done that to so many other articles I’ll never catch up. Give me the synopsis and the bullet points and I’ll have a better filter to decide whether or not I want to go in depth.

By: EP

EP — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:08:55 +0000

Very clever, and hopefully trendsetting. Here’s to more of those!

By: Foster Kamer

Foster Kamer — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:09:59 +0000

Both were posted almost simultaneously. I read the story from our side as if it were being run on another website, wrote it up like I would any other post, and then sliced it to the bare bones. This is about as close to the old “cut the fat” editing adage as you can get. Being that it was our own story, there was far more than the usual liberty taken towards being cruel in deciding which details weren’t needed, but also, heavier pressure to get the summary right. As someone who’s chopping up others’ writing during the week and who’s the writer on the weekends, this was a really, really entertaining act of editorial sadomasochism.

By: EP

EP — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:34:41 +0000

Thanks for this. It’s a great idea, as long as the stories are still read, and written, and paid for, and not completely substituted by their CliffNotes. Nice to see the longer narrative Gawker piece got more views and more comments. If both were posted at the same time as you say, that might be telling us something important.

By: Kirschty

Kirschty — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:19:36 +0000

Back in my college days, I was fortunate enough to ascend to editor in chief of the newspaper at a large Big Ten university. I took it upon myself to commence a redesign of the paper to commemorate of our 100-year anniversary, and I was all about “modern.” One of the things we tried — aside from centered headlines and multiple typefaces — was a “dashboard” running along the left of the front page. My hope was that this could be a home for quick summaries of the day’s top stories, hyper-distilled. It never really caught on — I think the paper was re-redesigned shortly after I left campus — but it’s gratifying, somehow, to see a similar treatment becoming more prevalent in the media. It’s almost a return to the old-old-old days, when big stories would have multiple informative subheads before the lede.