Six brief news writing tips — or are they?

Every semester I tell students in the introductory news writing class that the basics of writing in a news style will be useful in other types of writing.

Take this list, for example:

1. Keep it brief. Be concise, simple and precise…
2. Keep it simple… Use short words, active verbs, and common nouns.
3. Be friendly. Use contractions. Talk directly to the reader…
4. Put the most important thing first…
5. Describe only what’s necessary…
6. Avoid repetition.

Which Journalism 101 textbook did that come from?

Answer: None. It’s part of the “writing” section of Google’s design tips for developers of apps for Android phones.

The details of each step aren’t exactly what we tell news writers. With luck, journalists will be telling their stories on a larger canvas than a smartphone screen, and to an audience whose thumbs aren’t twitching for a return to Angry Birds. But good writing should work on both page sizes. News writers might think of themselves as designing a “user interface” for the information in their stories.

I especially like the ultra-conservative Android version of the “most important thing first” rule (emphasis added):  ”The first two words (around 11 characters, including spaces) should include at least a taste of the most important information in the string. If they don’t, start over.”

The old conclusion-first “inverted pyramid” news story’s summary lead emphasizes the first sentence. But the “two words” idea isn’t unique to Google. For online reading, usability experts with eye-tracking devices have been telling us for years that readers skim down through the start of each line. The “11 characters” reference leads me to believe that  Jakob Nielsen’s work is on someone’s desk (screen, bookmark list, bookshelf) at Google.

If nothing else, following that two-word rule might get beginning news-writing students to stop starting stories with the words “Last night…” — which could be the first two words of every morning-after story in a newspaper.

New tools and new tools

Nice article, if the link works…

New Tools for Today’s Investigative Journalist

I may have chopped off a few characters at the end or the address while fumbling with another “new tool” — not one mentioned in the article. My new $90 (refurb) Pandigital Android tablet is mostly for reading, not for any high-tech news-data crunching, but it’s proving useful. Newspaper websites’ mobile editions are actually readable at the breakfast table.

Panpad (my nickname for it) doesn’t use the latest version of Android or the standard Android Market for software installation, so I can’t do my usual bookmarking yet with a Delicious.com app or send the link to myself with a Gmail app. I can copy app installers from my Droid phone via SD card, but phone-specific apps, voice-input or gps won’t work on this more modest wifi-only device, and some of the apps are meant for a newer version of Android or a faster processor.

But it’s easy enough to launch Gmail or Delicious.com in the browser for now, but I do miss the delicious-bookmarking shortcut.

The Pandigital 7-inch is no iPad in screen quality or speed either, but (unlike an iPad) it does let me tap in words with my right hand’s long guitar-player fingernails the way I did on my old Palm Pilots, and it does have the SD card slot to share mp3s and documents with my phone or Macs. It has no camera or voice recognition, but it does fit a jacket pocket on at least one of my jackets. It works with my Verizon mifi hotspot or campus wifi. And being able to tap/type right-handed is important right now while I recover from an RSI injury to my phone-flicking left thumb.

(Perhaps it’s a hidden virtue that the Panpad isn’t able to play Angry Birds.)

As for saving links “in the cloud,” while the only Delicious app I have here needs an update (new owners, new widgets), this WordPress app does work as an Android extension on the browser’s “share” button. As a result, maybe you’ll see more blog-posting here related to interesting shareable Web content, like the article linked above.

Note: Apologies if I haven’t caught all the glitches in this tap-typing — the keyboard shortcuts sometimes turn “an” to “Android, give me “for” for “do,” and change “to” to “or” while my eyes are focused on the screen keyboard. I’m also trying to make sure I’m not typing a string or l’s for backspaces, “v’s” for spaces or random “a’s” for uppercase, when I mean to hit the keys below those letters. But it’s still easier on the eyes than my 1/3-the-size Droid phone screen.

Times Droid update better; still no cigar

The latest update of The New York Times Droid app shows some improvements, but I still prefer reading the Times mobile Web site with the phone’s browser. The good news: For those of us with aging eyes and smaller Android screens, the app now does larger fonts and uses the phone’s horizontal mode.

However, you still can’t zoom in on routine photos or graphics.

I also noticed there is no linkage between clearly related stories, such as today’s item about new New York education chief being recruited secretly and her actual appointment story. Only one of these appeared in my morning “latest news” feed, so I had to go search the “New York region” feed to find the other.

On the full Times website, a “Related” sidebar takes care of the connections.

• NYTimes: Bloomberg Took Secret Path to a New Schools Chief
• http://nyti.ms/aw3Koi
• NYTimes: Mayor Takes Idea of Education Outsider to New Level
• http://nyti.ms/9bjNIi

Another continuing annoyance, the Times app’s “share” button only provides the headline of the story and a compressed URL, as shown above. It copies and pasts that combination into e-mail, Facebook, Delicious bookmarks, blog posts and other services.

Unfortunately, some of them want more. There is still no way to copy and paste a story summary or selected paragraph or two into a blog post or email. Delicious, for example,  expects the URL and headline to paste into separate fields, with a third field for a summary or notes and a fourth for searchable keyword tags.

Finally there is a small improvement in the app’s advertising. My earlier visits would only show me a single ad repeated over and over — an ad for home delivery of the Times, which is not available in my neighborhood, something the Times might be able to discern from the GPS data it accesses through my phone.

The small improvement is that the startup pages of the Times now show a different ad. I think it is for a hotel chain but the image is so small that I can’t read it. However, the Times subscription ad comes back as soon as I click on a story. Maybe I’m supposed to book a room at the hotel and have the Times delivered there.

Grammar News, Good & Bad, at The New York Times

I just stumbled on what looked like  a useful resource page at The New York Times, the “Times Topic” page headed, Grammar News. Unfortunately, it seem the Times‘ attention to detail doesn’t extend to riding herd on the links on that page.

Several are out of date, including two to books by the late Theodore M. Bernstein, who was the Times resident grammarian back when I found his book Watch Your Language on the paperback rack at my local newsstand.  It was subtitled,  A Lively, Informal Guide to Better Writing, Emanating from the News Room of the New York Times, and I had just been offered the job of copy editor at my school newspaper. That was one of the better coincidences of my life.

How sad that the Times link to information about Bernstein’s book returns only a “404 not found” error message, the Web equivalent of just the sort of editing lapses he used to point out in the newspaper’s grammar and style.

Another old friend is similarly slighted. The late Kenneth G. Wilson, a vice president of the University of Connecticut when it was my beat at The Hartford Courant, wrote The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, a fine and good-humored reference book with some 6,500 entries.

The Times links to the address where the book was once offered for free online by Bartleby.com, but that’s no longer true. The same is apparently the case for The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Both links now go to the front page of the Bartleby site, not to those substantial reference books.

(Both volumes are still available as electronic resources through NetLibrary.com, which sells its services to university libraries like mine. The works also may be available on CD-ROM in some reference collections.)

Last, but perhaps the worst omission, the Times Grammar News page neglects to link to its own current “After Deadline” grammar feature, written by Bernstein’s successor at issuing critiques of grammar and style to the Times staff. He is Philip B. Corbett, identified on some pages as “deputy news editor,” and on others as “associate managing editor for standards,” presumably a well-deserved promotion. He is also in charge of the Times style manual.

It’s great to have his columns discuss issues that come up in student writing. Here are a few recent ones:

• Parallel Problems
• Loose Connections
• Headlines We Love Too Much
• The ‘Tweet’ Debate

I searched NYTimes.com and couldn’t figure out who his counterpart is for making sure the Web links all work, but I passed on the information above using a generic feedback form.

Smartphone apps, dumb advertising

I just installed the new TIME Mobile for Android application and the first thing I noticed was a totally wrong advertisement.

That reminded me: The first thing I saw when I loaded The New York Times Android app a couple of months ago also was a totally wrong ad.

And it’s still there: Every time I read a story.

My phone is smarter than that, especially if the applications are as smart (and intrusive) as they claim to be. But apparently not.

I sense a trend here: Smart media companies putting out “smartphone” apps with dumb ads. I wonder if they’re making the same mistakes on the iPhone side?

So what is TIME trying in vain to sell me on its Android app? Why, an iPhone app for its sister publication, CNN/Money! Dumb.

And how is the Times annoying me with the same ad over and over? By repeatedly presenting an ad for something I WANT, but can’t have: A home subscription to the Times. Follow that ad’s link, type in my zip code, and I get a rejection notice.

Only my love of irony (and the replacement cost) keeps me from throwing the phone across the room.

I just uninstalled and reinstalled the Times app to confirm my recollection of the first of a half-dozen Big Brotherish messages that greeted me when I installed it:

This application has access to the following:

Your location

fine (GPS) location

If that’s the case, you’d think something behind the scenes could check my location and offer to sell me something other than an unavailable home subscription.

The install warnings say the application also has access to “Services that cost you money; directly call phone numbers.” I’m still not sure what that means, but I guess I trust The New York Times.

Like I said, irony is a hobby of mine.

The news apps for the Droid annoy me in  other ways, enough to send me back to the Droid’s Web browser and the “mobile” version of the news organizations’ Web sites. For one thing, the Web version offers me more opportunity to enlarge the size of the type I’m reading. It also takes advantage of the Droid’s horizontal mode

Also, I’m a bookmark addict, using the “delicious.com” bookmarking service as http://delicious.com/bstepno to post hundreds (OK, thousands) of links to articles I’ve read, or feel guilty for not reading, or want my students to feel guilty for not reading.

The Droid offers a handy “Share This” button, with Delicious as one of the options (along with e-mail, Twitter and blogging engines), but some of these apps don’t implement Delicious sharing correctly. For example, the Times and USA Today apps plug both a story headline and URL into the “URL” field of the “Save to Delicious” screen, just they way they do when you “share” via Twitter or e-mail. That isn’t going to work with Delicious, which has separate fields for URL, title, notes and keywords. It forces me to cut, paste and edit, and I don’t always have time.

A related annoyance: The apps don’t allow me to copy a random paragraph from a story and paste it into a blog post or Delicious bookmark summary. “Sharing” means “share the headline we gave you, and that’s all.”

The Result: I’m sharing fewer stories from the Droid, more from my laptop, except when I switch to the Droid’s Web browser and the news sites’ “mobile” versions instead of the publications’ custom apps.

The Worry: As publications erect “paywalls” on their Web sites and make their Android, iPhone and iPad apps the 21st century equivalent of paid subscriptions, these news providers will take away the freedom to copy and quote easily that I (as an educator and blogger) have enjoyed for the past decade.

The good news: Buried in the last paragraph of today’s story about “jailbreaking” iPhones was some good news on the freedom to quote: “In addition to the decision on jailbreaking, the Library of Congress also granted an exception to artists who remix copy-protected video content for noncommercial work…”
USA Today also buried that news, but hits closer to home, saying the ruling will “allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy-protection measures on DVDs so they can embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos.”
That sounds like I can feel guilt-free when I cut and paste from DVDs of movies for the course I’m planning next spring semester, inspired by the “Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture” project. Yay!