Tedium - Longform Brevity 🗞

Today in Tedium: I have a bone to pick with one of the best-known news outlets on the internet, and pick it I shall. Since 2017, Politico cofounders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, along with a cast of notables, have taken a brevity-driven approach to writing about the news of the day, no matter what form it takes, on a site called Axios. Much of the content is written in bullet points that are designed to focus points of communication. The company has branded this approach as something called “Smart Brevity.” Now, it would be one thing to write everything in a quick hit format, but they’ve gone further than that, attempting to sell the communication approach to businesses and even writing a book about it, as if VandeHei is friggin’ running IBM over here. As someone who once ran a popular website that specialized in brevity, I first watched this state of affairs with a sense of cynicism, then bemusement. I have written Twitter threads to remind people that, hey, they weren’t first. I can’t help but think about, given all the tools they have, how little they do with brevity! Today’s Tedium is questioning whether that alternative story form journalism has a place on the internet besides bullet points. — Ernie @ Tedium

Is this person diving into a long-form newspaper the exception, or the rule? And how does journalism reach them? (No Revisions/Unsplash)

Do people actually want to read less, or more? And what should the story look like?

Ever since I got into journalism—I spent years working in newspapers as a graphic designer, by the way, and I owned Tim Harrower’s book—I have heard this debate about whether people wanted to dive into a 2,000-word story, or if they wanted something that provided most of the information they needed in a couple of hundred words.

When I got started, the short blurbs seemed to be winning, but over the last decade, as newspapers became less about paper, the longer pieces seemed to be making a comeback.

I think an excellent example of this tension in action came upon the launch of Vox in 2014. One of the key things it attempted to do was present content in a series of “card stacks” that explained information in a short, quick-hit style. But despite being a key element of the site’s creation, and arguably far more innovative than “Smart Brevity,” card stacks eventually got shelved in favor of more traditional storytelling, despite having driven much of the ideation around the site.

“I’m still proud of them and we still use them, but they’re not going to change the whole game. I think that’s clear,” Ezra Klein said of the idea in a 2016 podcast.

It’s too bad, because honestly, we could use something like them in modern journalism. But the inertia against that specific form is high.

In many ways, the move away from short reflects a shift in the medium of the page, rather than the needs of the reader. After all, the longer the content is, the more likely you’ll engage with it, right?

In some ways, this is the opposite of how it should really work. If the goal is reading comprehension, rather than engagement, we have to build for high information density, so that readers can get the most out of the content in the least amount of time. In an era when the literal newsprint was shrinking, this was the direction newspapers were largely moving towards before the pesky internet got in the way.

Unfortunately, this isn’t necessarily how it’s played out on the modern internet—where long content has become the more favored medium for consuming information, and there are no constraints as to how big or small the page should be.

Does Axios approach adding bullet points like it’s building out a shopping list? Or do they just write the story, then slap them on the page? (Torbjørn Helgesen/Unsplash)

I would argue that a big reason we’ve mostly moved from short content has to do with business realities, rather than the needs of the reader. And to me, I think that’s a big reason something like “Smart Brevity” exists. It is a way to play with the format of content without necessarily breaking the convention of a format that advertisers favor and readers are used to.

The problem is, a lot of Axios’ bullet points tend not to carry any rhyme or reason. For example, this piece published just this morning seems to start with a firm structure of “Why it matters” and “What’s happpening,” but about halfway in, the bolding and bullet structure falls apart, failing to maintain an internal logic. To me, a lot of Axios pieces read like that, where the bullet points seem to be in there to hit a bullet point quota or something. In many ways, I think Axios would do itself a favor if it mandated strict rules as to how to bold and how to bullet.

Other outlets, in my opinion, do this a lot better. Morning Brew, for example, uses a lot of bullets and bolding, too, but it does so in a way that actually seems to follow a logical shape.

I think we know that readers don’t get past headlines; I think the secret to solving this is not just bullets. We need to encourage new editorial shapes that break down data more efficiently. Unfortunately, I don’t think the ad department is going to love that.

A layout from the inside page of a 2010 issue of Maxim. You laugh or ignored it because of its photos, but Maxim was actually an extremely innovative publication in terms of how it organized information on the page. The challenge I see: Can we replicate this kind of approach online, without the risqué nature of the magazine itself?

What created the alt-story-form boom in print in the first place?

The layouts that Tim Harrower features in his quarter-century-old textbook are significantly more creative and interesting than anything that most modern websites are doing, where the path to least resistance has won out.

I’d like to make the case that a big reason that this happened was because of technical flexibility.

See, in the decades before computers, news pages were often laid out through paste-ups, hand-driven layouts that allowed some flexibility, but were often tedious to manage and standardize. (They also, as the name implied, required a ton of rubber cement.)

But starting in the late 1980s, computerized design programs became more common. In some ways, desktop publishing tools created a paintbox effect, in that it was way easier to break the rules of the format and stretch the capabilities of the form, leading to more experimentation, as well as flexibility to experiment, on a daily basis.

But the web had sort of the opposite effect. As websites had primitive roots where graphic design was a challenge and even an outright tension, it meant that convention mattered more in digital than it did in print. Also, the limited nature of the design tools, even with occasional shining lights such as Flash, meant that it was often easier to go with the status quo than to change things. (I think it’s also important to point out: With print, the publisher has control of the page where the layout ends up. With digital, the user does. That is a significant difference that I think has impacted how we approach design in the digital age.)

I guess it raises the question: If design tools became more flexible in digital contexts, where new ideas could be sketched out in a matter of minutes at an agility as fast as or faster than paste-ups or print layout, would it encourage new types of innovation in journalism?

Could we do more with short-form visual design than just throw a bunch of bullet points into the mix? Can the Maxim approach work on the internet?