Home pages from hell: Is there an editor in the house?
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A funny thing happened on the way to the Internet. The editors got lost. At least it seems that way. An editor organizes and selects. I like the French word for the process -- redaction -- which has to do with reducing, or compressing. It works like this: Cut the trivial. Accentuate what's important. Help the reader by getting to the point. But that's not happening with Internet journalism. News homepages are getting bigger, longer, heavier, more laden with options and choices and voices all clamoring for our precious attention. We should have seen it coming. How many newspaper journalists got excited about the Internet because it offers a "bottomless newshole?" Now we're living with the results: bottomless homepages. I counted the links on some newspaper homepages the other day. Actually, I had a computer do it for me. Computers can't edit worth a darn, but they can count pretty well. Here's what I found: 244 Miami Herald
Were there really 200 or so top-level choices that I desperately needed to make? It's not just a matter of too many links, or too many words. Often there's a lack of organization and focus in the presentation. The eye and brain can't easily process clusters of more than seven choices , according to research in cognitive psychology that pre-dates the Web by a couple of decades. But there's always a temptation to add an eighth, then a ninth, and before long it's 12 or 18 or 24. Every word, every link we add takes away from the prominence of every other. When everything's important, nothing's important. Editing is about making choices on behalf of readers. Hard choices. In a networked world, data isn't scarce. We're all drowning in data (and e-mail). What's scarce these days is scarcity itself. What's hard to find is clarity, brevity, and importance. Journalists can't be gatekeepers in a world like this, but we can surely be guides. People come to us for news because they trust us. They're not just trusting our integrity and accuracy. They're also trusting our editorial judgment. That judgment is as much about leaving things out as putting them in, and we need to think about that as we tighten up our bloated presentations.
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