Writing for the Web: Just ’cause you can write it doesn’t mean we want to read it
I can’t stay in a world without love, Chad & Jeremy once sang. But do we really want to stay in a world without length?
The Web can be pretty liberating for us old newspaper people — not only can you write a story, you can also do a video version of it, live-blog events, post audio and slideshows and all kinds of cool multimedia stuff. And you can write as long as you dang well please.
When my former newspaper ramped up its online presence a few years ago, one of the very first things we noticed about storytelling on the Web was the lack of a space limitation on your stories. Bosses say that story has to contain on page 1b at 7 inches? We can put a 16-inch version on the web! Copy desk says you can have 18, max, for that story that’s jumping to 4b? Write a 28-inch version for the Web and then trim it to 18 for print! Nevermind what Bowater wants to charge for a ton of newsprint these days — we have unlimited free pixels on the InterWebs!
But I’m older now, and I think the Web has matured, too — and so have its readers. So let’s get down to brass tacks here, kids: Just because you have unlimited space for your story on the Web doesn’t mean the world wants to read all of it.
Very few topics out there are truly worth an old-fashioned notebook dump, even when you’re writing for the Web. As journalists, it’s still our job to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff for our readers, and to tell them the stuff that’s interesting and important — which brings with it the responsibility of discerning what’s interesting and important, as well as having the courage to leave out all the rest. Our readers trust us to make those calls for them. And when we take them down the garden path to a destination that leaves them thinking, “Gee, that was a colossal waste of my time,” we’re going to lose that trust.
I’m as guilty as anyone of overwriting. But we all need to have that little voice inside our heads that says, “This is too long.”
Just my two cents’ worth.