The Long and Short of It : Internet Allows Great Detail, but Will People Read Lengthy Stories Online?

Many people aren’t comfortable reading long stories on a computer screen. Not yet anyway.

“People don’t want to read a 6,000-word article on-screen,” says Kevin McKenna, editorial director of the New York Times Electronic Media Co.

In fact, says Anthony Perkins, chief executive officer and editor in chief of Herring Communications, publisher of magazines and online services that specialize in technology and business, “My general feeling is that people don’t like to read more than 200 or 300 words on the screen. . . . That is the great limitation to online” publishing.

But just because stories are published online doesn’t mean they have to be read on a computer screen. People who prefer to read stories on paper can print the stories out and do just that. About 60% of the readers of Slate, the online magazine published by Microsoft, do that now, the magazine says.

This opens a whole new vista for news organizations. They can publish lengthy transcripts, court rulings, speech texts and other official documents that printed newspapers don’t have enough room for.

A printed newspaper can publish the basic outlines of proposed tax legislation, for example, and even include illustrative examples of how the law might affect a few typical taxpayers. But the paper’s online edition can provide a form for readers to key in their financial information and find out how the bill would affect them (as many online newspapers now do).

At the moment, online publishing is just too new for anyone to make definitive judgments on whether the Internet will be a reader’s medium. Or a writer’s medium, for that matter. As in any other media, publications will have to learn how to write and display stories in an engaging fashion, appropriate to that form.

“They say people don’t want to read long articles on the Net,” says Brock Meeks, editor and publisher of Cyberwire Dispatch, an online news service, and chief Washington correspondent for MSNBC. “That’s bullshit. People don’t want to read long articles that are boring. They don’t want to read short articles that are boring either--in any medium.”

Writing for the Net can be different than writing for a print publication, and not many have mastered it yet. The best writing on the Net tends to be somewhat colloquial and conversational, more personal and less formal than most newspaper and magazine writing.

“We are searching for the right voice--an e-mail voice, something between talking and writing,” says Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate.

Online writing also tends to be sharper-edged than that seen in most traditional print publications. It has an “attitude.”

“Those who will be successful writing online will be those who rely on journalistic standards but ratchet it up with their own attitude and opinions,” Meeks says. “But it has to be an attitude with a solid journalistic foundation, not a replacement for that foundation.”

Most traditional journalists are trained not to have an attitude--at least not in print or on the air. They are supposed to be evenhanded, sober-minded presenters of the facts. But just as television news forced most print reporters to provide more analysis--which often merges facts with opinion--so television chat-and-shout shows have prompted some journalists to adopt more attitude--which often merges opinion with smart-ass posturing.

Given the rewards that accrue to many who go on those shows and provide glib answers to complex questions--instant celebrity, peer recognition, lucrative speaking engagements and book contracts--some serious journalists worry that the Internet will exacerbate the growth and appeal of that dubious art form.

Brevity and attitude are not the only features that distinguish writing for the Web from writing for a printed publication. One of the primary appeals of the Internet is the ability to link a wide range of stories and sources of information and entertainment to each other. Almost any word in an online story can appear underlined (or otherwise highlighted) on screen, and the user can click on that word and be instantly taken to another Web site, containing more information on that aspect of the story. Some links are not words but icons or pictures or other graphic material.

A story on, say, the appointment of a new police chief for Los Angeles that mentioned the new chief’s previous jobs, his predecessors here, the selection process and the other top contenders could have on-screen links to stories on each of those subjects.

This enables users who want greater detail to find far more than a newspaper could possibly print, but it also enables those who just want the basic facts to get those without having to wade through an extremely lengthy story.

Links can be counterproductive, though. John Barrymore, the actor, once complained that being diverted from the text of a book by a footnote is like having to go downstairs to answer the front door while you’re making love, and in much the same way, links embedded in the body of a story can distract a reader from the main point of the story--and take him away from the article altogether.

In his “Off the Rack Column” on the Web’s Electronic Newsstand, Andrew Hearst warned that many Web publications “seem to believe that the way to take advantage of the Web’s non-linear structure is to put as many links as possible into everything they edit and write, regardless of whether or not the information accessible through the link is directly relevant to the piece.”

Links embedded in an online story enable readers to do more than just go to other stories. A link can lead to a chart, a photograph, an audio recording, a video clip, an advertisement--any of the wide variety of features available on the Internet. While this broadens the options for storytelling, it also has some risks. Lines can be blurred, not only between news and advertising, but between a site’s own identity and reputation for integrity and the potentially lower standards of another site that users can link to so quickly and seamlessly they don’t realize it it isn’t really part of the original site.