When the tool changes, so too should the skill and the technique. More and more, hypertext is replacing text… and the Web is replacing print.
“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of The New York Times told Haaretz.com in February 2007.
According to Sulzberger, The New York Times is on a journey, a journey that will end on the day The Times prints its last newspaper. Radical times; a momentous shift is underway.
We who are involved with content are on an exciting journey. At a certain point, the economics and ease-of-use of the Web will become so compelling that print will simply not be able to compete.
At this historic juncture, we need to carefully evaluate where we stand. We need to understand what skills are specifically print-related. We need to isolate print-thinking, so that a strength in a previous era does not become a weakness in a new one.
What is print-thinking? Print lends itself to length and to economies of scale. It’s not that much more expensive to print a 120-page report than a 100-page one. It’s often not much cheaper to print one copy than to print 1,000. These economies of print influence how we write in subtle and various ways.
Is the concept of the annual report a print-specific idea? Why do we need an annual report when we can get an instant update by visiting the website of the organization? Often, the content of an annual report is assembled months before it is published. It can be out-of-date and irrelevant long before the ink dries.
When an organization prints customer-related content, that content is nearly always to be consumed outside the
organization. Thus, it is written in a very particular way, with lots of context, and with many sentences beginning with the name of the organization. It is designed to go out.
The content on an organization’s website is designed to stay in. The website itself is the context, and the very fact that the customer has visited the website implies that they have a certain awareness of the organization. This crucial difference can change the whole dynamic of how you write web content.
Print content is often leisurely and flowery. Web content is lean and pared to the bone. Often, the best web content is not a sentence at all, but rather a descriptive link.
Linking is the essence of web content, and a good web writer thinks in webs of links, rather than in series of pages. This is perhaps the greatest challenge for someone trained in print-to break that linear mode of thinking and think linking.
Search dominates much of the Web. Search reflects a shift in the control of the words used away from the organization and towards the customer. Search is customer language-simple, short, common, clear and basic words. Not complicated, jargon-filled, marketing-fluff ones.
This is a tremendously exciting time. Make sure you don’t confuse the tool and the technique. Some say: “But this is
simply good writing.”
No. It is good print writing.
Learn to embrace the new skills of web writing, and to lose the old and increasingly archaic skills of print.
Gerry – I agree that reading for information will move increasingly to the web, where it will be bulletized and truncated. But as long as there are still people who read for pleasure and for greater understanding of some topic or, in the case of literature, about life, there’ll be print of some sort or other.As a reader, I sure hope so.
(Maybe you can boil most plots down to “boy meets girl/boy loses girl/boy gets girl back”. So you have some fundamental information on what happens, but you really don’t gain all that much understanding or pleasure out of it.)
It seems to me that the “print is dead” mantra and “write for the Web” philosophy plays particularly well for certain kinds of writing — like annual reports, corporate web sites, company-produced content, and the like. But I can’t, for example, foresee a day when products that rely on good writing — The New Yorker, for example — ever “write for the Web,” even if they cease to have an actual print publication.
Newspapers like the NY Times are vulnerable to the Web for reasons other than their writing approach. Newspapers are having their lunch eaten on so many fronts — from bloggers to Craigslist — that Arthur is wise to not cling to his paper’s print vehicle. The bottom line is that print newspaoers no longer *make sense* as a way to deliver information.
I agree with Ann and Maureen. If you are a web writer and have previously been a print writer perhaps your blog applies to that situation only, but not towards writing as a whole.
Multi-channel marketing is the backlash of web only thinking. People want to read catalogs, they want their magazines, and I know a lot of people who love their newspapers.
So I would be cautious about saying print writing is entirely archaic. People don’t change as fast as technology.
I think there will always be a place for the printed word. Reading long copy on a screen is not as easy, especially for aging eyes and people with certain disabilities.
Research shows that only 11% of e-mail readers read entire e-mails – most skim the content. Although e-mails are typically not novels or news, these results may give us a glimpse into the comprehension level of screen readers.
There’s something comforting about turning pages in a suspense novel, poring over a full-length op-ed article or expose, or highlighting passages in a textbook for an upcoming exam. Maybe these experiences will become nonexistent in another generation, but for now, a lot of people still like print.
Gerry, I think Sulzberger retracted or “clarified” his comments about The Times eventually not having a print edition.
But more important, I think, is that good writing is good writing, whether in print or online. The style of writing should fit the medium, the audience and the message. Some vehicles call for flowery prose, while others need crisp and succint. (I’ve seen plenty of blogs that drone on and say in 500 words what can be said in 200 well-written words.)
Writing for online media can have the distinct advantage of
links. But not every reader will want or need to refer to the linked information. Like the Sunday New York Times (both print and online editions), it’s nice to know that all the news that’s fit to print is there, even if you choose not to read it all.
Thanks for all the comments. I still read lots of books myself, and, in fact, I’ve just published one! I was being a bit provocative.
I find in a lot of organizations an automatic assumption that if it’s created already for print, in Excel or PowerPoint, or whatever, then all you have to do is put it up on the Web.
Sure, we will always have print. But the Web is an excitng space for those who can truly adapt to its challenges and opportunities.