"Let's put it on the Web and reach a whole new audience."
That's what many science writers and publishers have begun thinking. Since we've already done so much work to produce a publication in print, they reason, why not put it on a website as well? It only takes a little tweaking and HTML code.
It takes a lot more than that, as I discovered recently when working on a book, Beyond Bio 101, that was published simultaneously in print and as a website at http://www/hhmi.org/BeyondBio101. Adapting a publication for the hyperactive world of the Web posed many interesting questions, the most fascinating of which involved the rhythms of writing.
Almost all of us base our writing rhythms on the linear expectations of print-or, for that matter, of television or radio. We assume people read our work in a certain order. This is true whether we're writing a news story, with facts presented in order of importance, or a long feature that uses short story techniques to develop conflict and build to a climax.
But the Web is different. You can't build up an internal rhythm within a story-news, feature or otherwise-because there's no space to do it. A computer screen, even a big one, displays only a few hundred words. For stories longer than that, readers must either scroll down or jump to another screen. There's no guarantee they'll jump from screen number 5 to screen number 6. Just as likely, they'll head to screen number 17, or back to the home page or maybe off to HotWired.
Our linear tradition of science writing does not translate easily to the Web. The point of entry to a sidebar may not be the main narrative but the Nicole Kidman Worship Page. Instead of flowing from paragraph to paragraph, the reader's eye may dart to the chromatic icon that just exploded in the margin.
The printed page is not disappearing any time soon. For anyone thinking about a future in cyberjournalism or whose publication is moving onto the Web, however, the handwriting is on the screen: They are going to have to rethink how they put together stories. The same thing happened with radio and television. Now, as we move to the Web, we are likely to write in ever-smaller pieces. Although many newspapers already use extensive sidebars and other devices to break up stories, the Web may take us to stories that lack a central narrative entirely. A story will become a series of stand-alone screens linked as a mosaic.
Some writers may shriek that this is the ultimate dumbing-down of journalism-the triumph of screen bytes over substance and narrative rhythm. But individual screens can be filled with content and assembling them requires a great deal of rhythm. Only now, the rhythm comes from the relationship of the pieces rather than from within the flow of a text, and from a new balance of words and design.
I've come to think of this "pointillist journalism," after Georges Seurat and other Impressionist painters who created beautiful canvases from thousands of individual dots. As the Web expands, a growing number of science writers may begin learning a similar style. Certainly they cannot simply recycle a narrative of 4,000 words for an online audience used to CNN Interactive and online stock quotes.
That's not to say that Web surfers won't read long stories. But they won't read them on a screen, not consistently. The format just doesn't work with this medium. That's why people send long stories to their printers or order the printed version of Slate.
In publishing Beyond Bio 101, Steve Olson, the chief writer, and I tried to create synergy between the two formats. The publication, which was produced and distributed free by my employer, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), deals with the transformation taking place in undergraduate biology education.
Its abundant examples, drawn from programs funded with HHMI grants, made the book much easier to deconstruct for a new life on the Web. We decided to adapt it only after we were well into the project, since the Web was very new when we started. And we held off decisions about the approach to take until we studied numerous Web 'zines and online newspapers, arguing with each other, art directors Liz Clark and John Isely, and Web designer Jim Holloway about what worked. One of the best investments a writer, editor or publisher can make, in fact, is to spend time cruising lots of websites to see how different designs affect the writing.
One lesson we learned from Salon and Slate, for example, is that articles can run as long as 1,000 words on a single screen. Shorter is better, however, and you need to present the best graphics near the top of the screen to entice someone to take a look, especially if they've just arrived from another site. Once they start reading, they may be willing to keep scrolling even if the landscape fades into a plain screen.
If the text is very long, such as a chapter from a book, you must divide it over several screens. We had to do this with a chapter in Beyond Bio 101 that provides an extended look at a young professor's struggle to balance teaching, research and family life. Frankly, the story works better in print than on the screen. It's a good read but you have to click through five consecutive screens. The rest of the book fares better because every screen stands alone, or at most jumps to one sub-screen.
Someone writing solely for the Web can avoid these problems in the same way that an original screenplay requires no retrofitting of a stage script. When adapting long narrative sections from a printed page, however, you either have to use very long screens or go through the tedious process of slicing and reorganizing the sections. We largely avoided this problem with Beyond Bio 101 because the text was already quite modular. But that's not always the case. As editors seek to publish in a dual format, some writers may be pressured to "write short" from the outset to reduce subsequent editing.
The screens in Beyond Bio 101 mimic the order of the printed publication. But we encourage readers to traverse "horizontally" as well as "vertically," with every screen linking to a related story in another chapter. Someone reading about a training program for high-school science teachers organized by the University of Colorado at Boulder, for example, can click to another chapter for a description of science programs for high-school students at Xavier University of Louisiana.
We needed to make clear to readers both at the outset and throughout the site that this was a book with inter-related articles. The opening screen serves as a table of contents but is not necessarily the starting point. Someone at Wellesley College, for example, may arrive from Wellesley's website, which links to a screen in Beyond Bio 101 that discusses science programs at Wellesley.
To help orient such a reader, we provide two contents boxes on every screen. One box lists the topics within the chapter, and the other lists the remaining chapters. In this case, the reader sees that the story about Wellesley is part of a larger chapter on attracting women and minorities to the life sciences, a chapter that connects to six others.
Every screen offers navigational button bars at both top and bottom, and icons to click back to the home page or a resources section with links to other websites. There's also an online order form where readers can request a free copy of the printed publication or download the entire Beyond Bio 101 website onto their hard drive.
Since our primary audience is scientists who teach undergraduates, we made the assumption that most readers are using networked machines with relatively fast connections and up-to date browsers. Accordingly, we placed photos on almost every screen. However, we limited the graphics to a size manageable for readers with 28,800 baud modems.
The Beyond Bio 101 website has won "Cool Site," "Hot Site" and other awards, but what's most important is how it has extended the impact of the publication. Many readers who never would have seen the printed version have discovered the website. Biology educators as far away as Hong Kong and Namibia have written us, and the online version has led several faculty members to order sets of the printed document for departmental retreats and curriculum planning.
Other science writers are going to face a similar "screening process" over the next few years as their organizations develop websites. In the process, science journalism will change significantly. My own prediction is that traditional long-form writing-whether on research, education or other topics related to science-will morph on the Web into this new Pointillist Journalism. As Stephen Sondheim wrote in the song about Georges Seurat, we'll learn to take stories apart and reassemble them step-by-step and piece-by-piece into a new style of writing.
David Jarmul is associate director of communications for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and editor of Beyond Bio 101.