What.

While We Were Here is a 16-page free souvenir newspaper with a print run of 4,000. It was put together by a small team of volunteers during this year’s Greenbelt Festival. It included a 4-page black and white comic pull-out in the centre of the paper. You can download a copy of the main paper or the comic in PDF formats.

Where.

Greenbelt Festival takes place over four days at the end of August every year at Cheltenham race course. There’s no accommodation on site that’s not under canvas – so the newspaper team were camping out on the course along with about 20,000 other festival-goers. We appropriated a small box that’s normally used for watching the races and turned it into a newsroom, with two design Macs and three or four laptops at any given time. There were not enough chairs, the carpet went half-way up the walls, and we were constantly watched by pictures of small men on large horses.

Who.

In total there were ten people involved in making the main paper. We didn’t have much to do with the comic guys – they did their own thing and arrived perfectly on time with all their spreads in PDF form. Our team was brought together by Matt Patterson as hands-on managing editor and James Stewart as hands-off. I was the editor. James Weiner and Paul Abbott worked on data and infographics for the paper. Ben Weiner,  Will Quirk, Geraldine Nassieu-Maupas and Oliver Mayes made up our design and layout team, and Wilf Whitty dealt with some last-minute front-cover design issues.

The rest of the team were primarily design-minded folks and I was (as far as I know) the only one with newsroom experience. As a result partly of that and partly the fact that I’ll organise anything if it stands still near me for long enough, I took charge of content planning and making sure we had something interesting, well-written and appropriate for print on every page.

Why.

As a tangible souvenir, something to commemorate the experience of being at Greenbelt for those who were there and something to express a little of what it was like for those who weren’t. Something that’s separate from the blog or the Flickr stream or the Twitter conversations, a document that physically exists and can be handed around families, shown to children, given to grandparents, in a way that the internet still can’t.

And, in a very real way, we did it because we could.

When. How.

I was one of the last of the team to arrive on site, on Friday morning. At 2.30pm the team met for the first time and found out our general brief. Over the next four hours we hammered out a page plan for the paper, focussing on what we felt were the major themes and events from the Festival that people would recognise and want to read about. We decided who would be covering what in terms of writing content specifically for the paper. I briefedthe Festival’s photographers about what we’d need and when. We made up a flat plan and stuck it to various pictures of horses, and I wrote up a schedule working backwards from our hard deadline – 6pm on Sunday.

We made the paper in just over two days. The design team did a lot of work on Friday night and Saturday morning putting templates and grids together, while I did vox pops and got quotes from various festival punters. I started to put content together on Saturday afternoon, which is when it became clear that we couldn’t use most of the content from the two people who were blogging the festival over the weekend. One person’s writing was very long-form, personal and intellectual, while the other’s was very short-form and timely – both made for great blog posts but wouldn’t work in print. I started roping in people to write reviews and snippets of content, as did managing editor James Stewart. The infographics team finally managed to get hold of some data they could use and started drawing golf buggies in Illustrator.

By Sunday lunchtime we had about half of what we needed copy-edited and in formats ready to put on the page, and we had two neat infographics ready to place. I spent the next three or four hours writing, helping choose pictures, deciding what content needed to go in which boxes, copy-editing and being very rude to other people’s work so it would fit in print-sized boxes, while next to me the layout team collaborated to pull it all in to InDesign and make it look perfect. By about 4pm we had collected all the content we needed; the next two hours involved me pacing around the newsroom, making sure we had everything in the right place, picking different pictures when the ones we had didn’t work out, and occasionally taking a seat and making changes to the text or the design when things simply wouldn’t fit right.

Matt started uploading it at about 6.45pm. Network sloth meant it finally finished at about 8pm. The printers in Peterborough turned their presses on for about a minute and a half, and we had a print run of 4,000 copies. Four hours later thanks to some strangers who drove through the night for us, it was back on site ready for the first copies to be distributed at the last show of the evening.

Lessons learned.

• Planning is vital, much more so for print than for online journalism. If a blog post doesn’t go up or goes up late, few people will notice. If there’s a hole in your print paper, they definitely will. Thematic planning for something like this is crucial too – content should fit together, images should complement each other, pages should balance. That’s impossible to do with slapdash content delivered at the last minute.
• Briefing, therefore, is another crucial element. You can’t simply say “Write me 450 words about the music scene.” You need to make deadlines clear and make sure you’ve agreed which bits of the music scene are necessary. You need to talk about tone, audience, readability, style, voice. You need to make clear what’s needed, even when you’re both up against deadline, so that the content you get back is useful and takes the minimum of editing or rewriting.
• Build in redundancy. One of the reasons the paper worked well despite some of the content-related setbacks we had is that we did our best to get hold of more content than we needed – about half as much again. If I was doing it again I’d be shooting for twice as much, if not more. If it’s not used in the paper, it could go online; if it’s something that works better online, we wouldn’t have to force it into a print style. And if it doesn’t turn up, it doesn’t matter.
• Get data well in advance. Infographics are awesome but they can’t be created without data. If you have a tight deadline and you’re including data-driven charts or graphics, that’s the bit you should sort out first. We didn’t, and that’s why we only have two in the paper.
• Basic newspaper design skills are invaluable, even if you’re not a designer. If you’re planning content for pages, you need to understand how boxes fit together on a page, how headline size and positioning alters layout, what a baseline grid is, the difference between a 3-col and 4-col layout for a page, and a dozen other little things that don’t bother you while you’re writing but that become vital as soon as you’re laying out. You need to know the rules, what they are, how they can be bent and when they can be broken. Otherwise you end up coming in and asking questions like “Are we really wedded to a serif font?” and “Do we really need to lock to grid?” half an hour before final deadline. (Yes, this happened. No, it wasn’t me.)
• If you’re distributing content across multiple channels, a convergent newsroom is potentially a huge timesaver. This would have prevented completely the problems we had with last-minute content and having to repurpose pieces that were not right for print in their original forms – but it takes a lot of advance planning. Having a pool of writers – not necessarily bloggers or writers for print, just writers – who could be briefed individually by the blog editor and the newspaper editor, and whose work could be pulled to be used in one or both formats, would have been very valuable. Doing the same with images and video could mean a converged team in three parts: content creators at one end, putting their work into a big pool; editors in the middle, picking out the best of the bunch or the most appropriate for their medium; and distributors at the other end, feeding that work into the newspaper, the blog, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, the various other channels including feeding out to the magazine shows and round-up events on site – and making it easy for the press office to pass out the best of what’s on offer too. I think this is the biggest thing I’ve taken from the experience – I grok convergence much better now I’ve seen it from the editor’s point of view.

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An interesting post extolling the virtues of the paywall by Julien Rath as part of journalism.co.uk’s excellent TNTJ group blog has really gotten me thinking. Not because I agree – far from it – but it’s finally forced me to put into words my own views on the massive paywall debate.

I don’t like them. I don’t think that most papers have ever been bought on the basis of the news content - or even the op-ed and columns. (Sometimes the columns – Bridget Jones springs to mind – but rarely, and certainly not enough to subsidise an entire paper.) Asking people to pay on the web for things they don’t necessarily value enough to pay for in print – this seems pointless to me.

There’s a laundry list of ideological complaints about paywalls. They trap journalism behind a wall, cutting off access to information in a terribly anti-open-web sort of way. They create gated communities where dissent is unlikely and where the turbulent streams of the open web can’t intrude – for better or worse. They ensure a sort of private members’ club that cuts off those who can’t or don’t want to pay, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on your point of view.

Ideology aside, my most basic reason for disliking paywalls is business based. We have declining circulation in print, which means very few new paper readers will come to our websites based on what we’ve put in our newspapers. One of the obvious ways to gather new readers therefore is online, getting young people used to seeing our content linked on Facebook, Twitter, social networks they belong to and appreciate, in the hope that we can drive brand loyalty through those platforms and maybe, eventually, a few of those people will start reading the paper.

What happens to that model if there’s no accessible content online? It dies. What’s the plan to attract new readers to your brand above all others if it’s all behind a paywall? I haven’t yet seen one that works. It doesn’t matter how well-written or wonderful your editorials are – if no one can link to them they aren’t going to drive new traffic to your site.

Breaking news content online will rarely if ever be unique outside exceptionally specialist circles. Commentary, analysis, feature articles are more “valuable”, but very rarely irreplaceable given the vast amount of alternative and specialist content available for free elsewhere. And many news consumers now read what their social circle reads and links. We come through that to like personalities or subject-specific content, but that’s not the same as a brand loyalty – I read Charlie Brooker and the Guardian Datablog regularly, but that doesn’t mean I ever read the Guardian homepage. Paying for the whole Times website when I just want Caitlin Moran doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – especially when I can’t search for Times content using my normal methods (Google) and no one else links me to it because it’s all behind a wall, so I’d have to go hunting for it specifically if I wanted to include it in my daily reading. If many other net users are like me then they won’t be willing to pay for a whole bundle when what they want is one strand.

I’m more open to the idea of limited paywalls on sites like the proposed New York Times one, where only very regular readers – the folks who are already brand loyal – get charged for content. I still think they do more harm than good, because at that point you’re essentially punishing people for liking you too much. If the expectation is that content is free, suddenly charging is going to irritate people and drive them away from engaging too strongly.

Yes, journalists need to be paid for what we do. We need to eat and live, after all. I’m interested in the idea of micropayment systems that let me pay pennies at a time for content from any one of hundreds of news sources – from specialist science papers via Athens through the Financial Times through the Sun, I suppose, pretty soon. I’m interested in untapped affiliation potential – ticket sales, restaurant bookings, holidays, iTunes links next to band reviews. We can still make money from picture sales, family notices and so on, but we can do it in new ways – like the death notices my paper has set up where a single payment gets you not just the notice in the paper but also a living page that remains as a permanent and changing tribute. And that’s before we get into serious targetted advertising solutions, or the content changes that have got the Mail Online to where it is today. [Edit to clarify: I'm not suggesting that any one of these is a magic bullet that will save the news industry. I'm simply pointing to possible multiple revenue streams that I feel are worth exploring to see whether they could go some way towards paying for news.]

I’m not Rupert Murdoch. I haven’t sat in front of the figures or done the maths with real audience numbers, so like most other people I’m just having a good old reckon. Still, I reckon there are better ways forward than paywalls. What do you think?

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I’m stopping mid-travel on the way to spend a long weekend making a newspaper in a field, because an exciting new thing happened today.

I’m going to be teaming up with some of the guys at Neon Tribe – a local web dev firm who make awesomely exciting shiny Internet things with open data – to learn more data skills. I’m hoping to collaborate to bring a few of my long-brewing ideas to fruition, make a few shiny things together, and ultimately learn and improve the skills I need to make shiny things all by myself.

It’s not clear yet how much time I’ll get to spend doing this – most if not all will have to be outside my standard working hours as there are heavy constraints on resources in the newsroom right now – but even if it’s just an hour a week being a hack in a roomful of hackers, absorbing, learning and imparting with a few projects to focus on, it’s going to be a very exciting and – I hope – productive time.

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I’m off to Greenbelt Festival at the weekend, and this year I’m on the team creating a print newspaper for the festival.

I blogged last year (when I was just starting out here) about the newspaper they gave out at the festival – a 16-page freesheet called While We Were Here, made possible only at the last minute with sponsorship from Hewlett Packard. It used content that was already online, sourcing images from Flickr and text from blog posts, in a neat reversal of the print-first view you (still, sadly) often see in traditional newsrooms, and it was available for download for free online as well as handed out on-site. It was – is – a wonderful souvenir of the festival, as well as being an excellent way to convey the intangible experiences of the festival. Because it was created by people right in the thick of things, writing from-the-heart blog posts/I-pieces and not carefully detached articles of traditional journalism, it does a much better job of conveying the atmosphere of the weekend than any events listing or simple description could.

Since reading and enjoying While We Were Here last year, I’ve had some experience creating newspapers from scratch on my own. I made a miniature four-page newspaper as part of a performance/installation/community experiment called Home Sweet Home by theatre company Subject to Change, consisting of a tiny cardboard suburb where people from Norwich built their own mini houses, flats and businesses, using the community billboard, radio station and postman to create stories. I built a tiny Evening News newspaper office complete with tiny clay journalists and mini bundles of newspapers, and I ran a breaking news service (on a billboard made of card and matchsticks) for three days.

The paper itself was a four-hour job in InDesign using the Evening News print templates and masthead to create something faithful to the design of the paper I was representing. The stories were a more complicated proposition. Some folks volunteered bizarre tales and information themselves in letters; others created things I found fascinating, so I wrote letters asking for more information. Many stories came from the community noticeboard, which became an outlet for frustrations and campaigns as well as plenty of advertising. It was important to create a souvenir, something tangible people could take away, and to give people who hadn’t been there a flavour of the absurdity of the event – and part of that was treating very silly stories with the seriousness I would if they were real. The skills you need to gather stories in tiny cardboard towns are, it seems, the same as you need in big concrete cities – sharp eyes, a willingness and ability to engage and converse, the ability to go where people are talking and listen to what they say.

That experiment taught me a great deal about what’s important in newsgathering. I hope the weekend’s antics will teach me something new about storytelling. Greenbelt is an entirely different proposition to Home Sweet Home – many thousands more people and much less clear avenues for newsgathering, for a start, plus the fact that the newspaper is likely to be focussed once again on individual and collective experience rather than hard news. (Though if Peter Tatchell’s talk gets really controversial, that could conceivably change.) Although I haven’t yet had a detailed brief from project leader James Stewart – and I’m not expecting one till I get there – I suspect the paper this year will once again function primarily as a record of the experience of being there – and that means a different set of challenges to what I do every day. I’m looking forward to helping to make it happen.

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There are three tiers of journalism in the UK at the moment – national, regional and hyperlocal – but in all the discussion and excitement over open data, the voices of journalists working at the coal-face in the middle tier tend to be absent. That’s a shame, because regional news offers some fascinating and unique challenges for data journalism and computer assisted reporting.

At one end of the scale there’s national journalism, which covers big issues affecting all regions of the country or stories of national interest. In most media national journalism tends to be biased towards the south in general and London in particular, and in newspaper terms there’s a partisan/issues bias too, along with a clear character.

Then at the other end of the scale there’s hyperlocal journalism, geared around my street, my postcode, my community. These are organisations tackling incredibly specific situations, interested in minutiae and detail, as well as the impact of wider stories on the communities in question. It’s all about applying the national news to a very specific set of circumstances.

Somewhere in between, on a sliding scale depending on the size of the news organisation, is regional journalism. At the moment that’s where I fit in – at the city- and county-wide level depending on which paper I’m writing for. The stories I follow up are a mix of both – national stories with an impact on the communities I write for, and street-level stories with wider implications. We also cover wide regional stories with an impact on a substantial proportion of our readers – council stories, crime cases, the sorts of stories which nationals would not cover at all while hyperlocals would cover only the relevant parts.

After a conversation with the BBC’s Martin Rosenbaum at Hacks and Hackers, I started to understand that regional journalism has a particular set of needs and problems when it comes to data journalism. National news needs big picture data from which it can draw big trends. Government ata that groups England into its nine official regions works fine for broad sweeps; data that breaks down by city or county works well too. Hyperlocal news needs small details – court lists, crime reports, enormous amounts of council information – and it’s possible to not only extract but report and contextualise the details.

Regional news needs both, but in different ways. It needs those stories that the nationals wouldn’t cover and the hyperlocals would cover only part of. Data about the East of England is too vague for a paper that focuses primarily on 1/6 of the counties in the region; information from Breckland District Council is not universal enough when there are at least 13 other county and district councils in the paper’s patch. Government statistics by region need paragraphs attached looking at the vagaries of the statistics and how Cambridge skews everything a certain way. District council data has to be broadened out. Everything needs context.

The great thing about that? There are unending opportunities for good data journalism in regional news – opportunities to combine new technology and open data to produce something that’s relevant and useful to as many individuals as possible. The question is how we exploit them. I believe that we start by freeing up interested journalists to do data work beyond simply plotting their stories on a map, taking on stories that impact people on a regional level.

How do school catchment areas affect house prices? Since the county council decided to turn the lights off at midnight on certain streets, has there been an increase in crime? How have mental health service closures hit NHS waiting lists in the region? We should be using open data and freely available tools to do good regional journalism and helping people to find out.

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Last night I headed to London for the first Hacks and Hackers meetup in the country. It sprouted out of the Ruby in the Pub meetings and has been organised by Joanna Geary and colleagues at the Times as a meetup for journalists interested in coding and geeks interested in journalism.

It was very well attended – more than 50 people by my count – and full of interesting conversations to be had about what people are currently doing and what they want to move into. I hope it continues and develops into a more structured, regular meet – and that I don’t have to get up at 5.30am to do an early shift every time I want to get there.

A few things I took away:

• It’s obvious, but it bears repeating: ideas are easy, execution is hard. We need skills as well as inspiration to build what we want to build.
• The corollary: collaboration is key. We don’t all need to know how to do everything – what’s important is building working relationships with people who can make up for our own shortcomings.
• Regional data journalism is a massively different prospect from hyperlocal or national. This is something I need to parse out, probably in its own post, but an important realisation – regional data and its implications and interpretations have their own joys and challenges.
• There are not many regional data journalists, especially in print-first organisations. To my knowledge I was the only person there who works on a regional news organisation, never mind a newspaper. I suspect there are plenty of reasons for this – time, inclination and understanding being just the most obvious ones. If we want to include interested regional print people in these conversations, we might have to take the mountain to Mohammed.
• Practical beats theoretical. If you want to persuade someone that data journalism is important or relevant, creating something is far more persuasive than explaining it. Don’t preach it, do it.
• Start simple. Everyone I spoke to who’s played a part as a tech/social media/digital evangelist in their organisation has said the same sorts of things – start with what’s possible right now, and work upwards from there.
• Not everyone with something to say is on Twitter or participating on blogs. Sometimes if you have a wide circle of social contacts it’s easy to miss voices from outside that circle – and often those voices have something tremendously valuable to contribute.
• People are amazing. Everyone who was at the meetup last night had some incredible ideas and projects on the go. Everyone had something to offer, something to teach and something to learn. At the risk of sounding completely hokey, it gives me hope.

And here are just a few of the ideas that I heard kicked around for what the group could do in the future.

• Hour-long lessons in all sorts of subjects – Ruby and other languages, Freedom of Information requests, story construction, search engine optimisation, data cleansing, social media, and so on.
• Talks or discussions led by people with practical experience covering topics that hit the industry at the moment – monetising online, social media policy (or lack of it), the fallout from the Wikileaks disclosures, for instance.
• A swap shop for people looking for help with projects or for learning mentors – almost a lonely hearts system for hacks seeking hackers and vice versa.
• Practical demonstrations and talks from people with proven experience.

Whatever direction it goes in, I’m glad to have been involved and excited to see what happens next.

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I discovered on Wednesday that I’ve passed my NCE exams – and did particularly well on the News Practice exam, winning the Ted Bottomley award. (I love the name. Love it. Probably too much.)

The examiner [pdf] was very, very nice about my paper, saying:

A textbook example of how to tackle the Newspaper Practice paper. A comprehensive law
answer citing relevant cases and law, followed by practice answers that clearly demonstrate
the candidate’s imagination and ability. It is clear from this paper that this candidate is
already putting into practice the skills that the Newspaper Practice paper looks for. One of
the highest Newspaper Practice scores in recent years. A very impressive performance.

I’ve been trying to find the paper I wrote so I could work out what on earth I did right, but so far haven’t managed to unearth it. I’m pretty sure I arrived home and thrust it as far out of sight as possible along with the other papers.

But from what I remember, a staggering amount of what I wrote for the second half of the paper was about the internet. Specific, useful, relevant ideas about how to use it to move stories on, to facilitate comments and let the community take control of the conversation. I talked about topic pages, context as an integral part of news reporting, data journalism in many forms, visualisations, mashups, maps, timelines, social media, FOIs, online reportage in all sorts of guises and the importance of the hyperlink.

Anyone revising for News Practice exams – my best advice is read the links, think about how you can apply the theory to the practical, and good luck. Oh, and know your McNae’s. Nothing can beat that.

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In 1985 American literary critic Jane Tompkins published a book, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. It was an attempt to attract critical attention to novels – often bestsellers – that had been traditionally ignored or even panned by the canon-makers who dominated literary criticism. It represented an opening up of “low” art to “high” critical modes. Among other books, it looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin not just as a sentimental novel but as a persuasive political text that swayed the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere. It credits it with an important role in the Civil War – that of getting the word out and making it cool to be anti-slavery.

Tompkins talks about bestselling fiction as cultures speaking to themselves. Harry Potter and Twilight and Dan Brown’s works aren’t just bestsellers because they have a good story or they’re wonderfully written – if anything, they suceed despite that. What those books all do is take a central cultural dilemma and work it out in a safe, controllable way, helping to assuage the fears and worries of millions of readers and allowing them to reimagine the world with those conflicts resolved.*

Journalists are just as much a product of the cultures we write in and about, no matter how much we’d like to pretend otherwise sometimes. Perhaps the only exception is Wikileaks, because it’s outside national cultures; even so, its journalism work is subject to the same forces and influences as the rest of us.

Yesterday Wikileaks published, simultaneously with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, 92,000 logs from the war in Afghanistan that show the conflict at its most naked and basic. There are too many of the documents for the picture to be clear at this stage – there’s still a lot of work to be done – but the three news organisations have already done a great deal of work towards stitching coherent narratives together to make stories for easy consumption.

But the story resists consumption. There is no easy line through the logs that builds a narrative anyone can agree with; the documents are sticky and difficult and present problems that are simply insurmountable. As Wikileaks fouder Julian Assange said today:

The real story is that it is war, it’s one damned thing after another. It’s the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces (…) This is the story of the war since 2004 and like most of the accidents that occur in the world, they are as a result of cars not buses, most of the deaths in this war are the event of the everyday squalor of war, not the big incidents.

But that’s not a comfortable story that gets us to sleep at night. It’s not our brave boys or the illegal war or Private Jessica Lynch, whichever version of the story you read. The good guys aren’t so great and the bad guys aren’t easily identifiable and everything is blurred right down to the level of individual decisions that might or might not be right, on the ground, in that time and place. That’s not a story that assuages any fears or resolves any conflicts neatly or easily.

And for that reason, I agree with @jayrosen_nyu. He says:

I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, but haven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, in what I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday: “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

Journalism, like literature, is a culture speaking to itself, defining itself, creating and reinventing itself. Whether fiction or non-fiction, a good story has to be in the right place at the right time in order to make real change within a culture. Yesterday’s Afghanistan log disclosures aren’t safe, or pretty, or easily understood. They don’t tell a story that anyone can nod along to. They don’t lend themselves to easy summation or even a coherent narrative. They remind us that the situation is far more complicated than we normally imagine. And I don’t think that’s a story we want to tell ourselves right now.

* Because those are all relatively recent works, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely which conflicts they’re resolving and how. If I had to: Harry Potter is dealing with anti-technology backlash, fear of rapid change, desire for an underlying order in a world without metanarratives, and the fact that the good and the bad guys all look the same these days; Dan Brown is dealing with surveillance and secrecy fears as well as the terror of the destruction of metanarratives and the worry that there might actually be no underlying purpose for anything; and Twilight is tackling changing and confusing rules and mores in male and female sexuality and transposing them into a “safe” traditional narrative where everyone knows the rules. But it’ll take a good few years yet before the picture is as crystal clear as, say, the way Peyton Place’s popularity came from how it dealt with fears and growing understanding of human sexuality in the wake of the Kinsey Report.

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This post is long, overdue, and wordy, and some of it was written while I had a fever. So I present as a pre-emptive antidote a very enjoyable and quite silly browser game about information overload.

When a fiction author chooses to use the possibilities of a linked and interwoven form in print, the result is something like Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a hugely ambitious first novel that’s been critically acclaimed for the way it melds form and content.

It’s about a labyrinth with a minotaur in it, basically, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. But the book itself becomes a labyrinth. It uses multiple chained footnotes like a chain of hyperlinks, splitting narratives like opening new browser tabs, and all sorts of typographical tricks up to and including one section that’s printed as though it’s become 3D – it’s reverse printed on verso pages so the words actually burrow through the pages of the book.

Offline, this is innovative and daring. Online, it’s normal for every one of us to create labyrinths of reading with no goal in sight. Before the days of tabbed browsing it was much more difficult, forcing wanderers to retrace their steps along chains of links to find a new pathway to explore. Now, thanks to ctrl+click, readers can stack up reading material and pass seamlessly from a dead end to a fresh path of content. With tools like Instapaper and Google Reader, online navigation options are far more complex than anything Danielewski can create on the page.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to something Nick Carr said a while ago. Nick Carr seems to believe hyperlinks are essentially evil footnotes, whose immediacy is a drain on the reader’s attention span and whose ubiquity is a drain on our brains.

He said:

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.

Plenty of other people have commented on other elements of his post, and I don’t want to repeat them. To be fair, his position is much more nuanced and complete than the snippet I quoted may make it seem – after all, he’s written books about it, as well as a more detailed look at his wider thesis. I don’t really want to get into that argument. Instead, I want to tease out yet another interpretation of the function of the hyperlink – two, in fact.

First: the inline link is very important for fluid reading experiences online.

One major element of Carr’s “literary reading” – as I understand it – is ludic reading. Literary reading doesn’t have much meaning as a descriptive term (though it does neatly sets up a false opposition between literature and the web).

There’s a very interesting pre-widespread-Internet academic look at ludic reading here (warnings: PDF, academic syntax/dialect/voice, loooong). Particularly interesting is the first study, which draws the conclusion that gratifying reading comes from the effortless extraction of information from the printed page.

Elsewhere, Nell suggests that response demands (such as being forced to write a blog post or book review afterwards) jolt a reader back into work reading, not the trance-like state ludic reading involves. But as media consumers we are becoming more and more used to response demands, from user input in games to “press the red button now” to, yes, hyperlinks. We’re used to taking control of our narratives and directing them – perhaps a logical extension of the unexpected variations of reading speed uncovered in study 2 in that looong PDF link.

One of the main features of ludic reading is that the physical book is forgotten, and the page becomes a window allowing the mind to freely associate within the words. Essentially you forget you’re reading, you lose track of time, you become engrossed and absorb new information, visual and textual, very readily. There are plenty of ways - including links – to facilitate easier online reading, helping the screen to become a window. But where reading online truly becomes trancelike is in link-rich environments like Wikipedia or Tv Tropes where a simple query becomes four hours of browsing.

And I’d posit now that we have tabbed browsing that ludic reading is easier than ever online. Long form and short form can co-exist simultaneously on our screens; we can open interesting links for later; we can lay out huge webs of narrative and navigate among them at will, choosing our own adventure. Without links we’re trapped in a dead end, jolted back to reality and left adrift at the end of an article.

Second: the link is a rhetorical and aesthetic device whose use amounts to a new grammar.

Links can be distracting in part because they carry extra information, not just text and the page behind it but in their associations, insinuations, destinations, context and positioning.

For instance, one of those links up there is an affiliate link to Amazon. Many – most? – people won’t notice, and of those that do very few will care, but the link carries extra information beyond the simple accessibility of another informative page. It might tell you that I’m trying to monetise this blog (though the lack of ads would contradict that). It might make you wonder whether those top few paragraphs about the book are really all that important for context for this post. You might even think subtly less well of me for introducing transactional elements into this space.

So what happens if, for instance, I link approvingly to someone who you violently disagree with? What happens to my credibility if I link to a debunked scientific study?

There’s an art to it, but links can also inject subtle humour, sarcasm or irony into a post. They can acknowledge opposing arguments while simultaneously refuting them. The choice of anchor text or title text can be informative, humourous, derisory, or share covert or overt jokes with the reader. And links can back up your points and convey authority.

Links can also act as visual markers for the form of blog post or article that you’re about to read. One link near the top of the page and a block quote might signal a re-blogging, a signal boost or note of approval for someone else’s work, or an extrapolation of an element of their post that the writer thinks merits more attention. Multiple links scattered through a post might suggest a synthesis of ideas, or a roundup of a current conversation. No links at all might signal a writer trying out new ideas, or not being able to find anything to substantiate what they are saying, or simply a lack of netiquette. Or the writer could be Nick Carr, of course.

That’s what you give up when you stop linking, or when you decide to restrict yourself to a single expression of the evolving grammar of the hyperlink. Links are tools that can be used well or badly. They’re rhetorical devices that can reinforce, trouble, illuminate or counterpoint the writer’s words.

And they represent a new grammar, just as font faces and illustrations and binding and cover decoration began to do after the invention of print. Sure, they can be distracting in certain situations, and they can be used incredibly badly at times (probably by me, too). But deliberately cutting them out of our writing online just because they can be badly used is like sacrificing everything but Times New Roman just because Comic Sans exists.

Finally, consider this a bibliography and a seed for many of these ideas.

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It’s a little quiet round these parts at the moment, thanks to a couple of work projects, a couple of extracurricular projects and these pesky impending exams.

So here’s a quick look at a few things I’m working on. A more regular blogging schedule will resume after Friday’s NCEs.

While I’m at work:

City of Culture
Since March, I’ve been planning, organising and running the Evening News campaign to make Norwich the first UK city of culture in 2013. (Do you know how much cumulative time, energy and repetitive copy it would save if I could hyperlink like that on my paper’s website? Anyway.) I’ve written or at least planned a page lead at minimum most days since the campaign began, jumping to more than 2,000 words a day during the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. Now we’re in the final push – the decision’s expected sometime in early to mid July, but we don’t know when. My job at the moment is to make sure we’re ready, whatever the decision, whenever it comes. Including if it comes on exam day.

Lord Mayor’s Celebrations
Every year since 1976 Norwich city council has held a celebratory weekend with a procession of floats. (The history of the parade goes back to the middle ages or further.) This year, the Evening News is printing 10,000 souvenir issues for the parade on July 10, with an 8-page supplement wraparound, as well as a lead a day in the week before the parade and the now-traditional 8-page picture-led supplement for the following Monday’s paper. I’m planning and writing most of the coverage for both, as well as shooting video and, bizarrely for me, sitting on the float judging panel.

Both of these are on top of the day-to-day general reporting life, tackling calls, early and late shifts, magistrates and crown courts, council committees and meetings, and other diary and patch jobs.

Oh, and revision. I forgot about the revision.

Extracurricular activities:

Six Months In Scents
I’ve just begun a blogging project I’ve planned for a while, challenging myself to write reflectively every day. I’m using my weirdly large perfume collection as a lens for a daily blog on scent, memory and the evocative links between them. Or I’m just writing an extended essay about the experience of community and collectivity around perfume that wouldn’t be possible without the Internet. Or I’m wearing a different scent every day for six months and waffling about how it makes me feel. It’s an experiment.

Live-action Pokemon Red game crossed with pub crawl
This needs no explanation. Well, actually, it needs a lot of explanation, and I’ll blog about it properly once we’ve considered the results from Saturday’s playtest.

Serious Business
My partner and I are going through the tricky business of writing up a business plan to turn Zombie from a not-for-profit hobby into a potentially profitable business. At times it’s mindtwistingly complicated but slowly it’s taking shape as a project that might turn a profit in a couple of years’ time.

On this blog:

I’m about 2/3 of the way through writing an enormous thinkypost about the aesthetics and grammar of hyperlinking in the wake of the Nick Carr affair. There are posts in the pipeline about Kingdom of Loathing‘s community, economy and monetisation, personalising journalism rather than customising experience, and a few other ideas that have caught my imagination.

But for now I think it’s fair to say it’ll be a little quiet around here till I’m the other side of the exams – even if it’s not so quiet anywhere else.

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