Feature-style stories outperform traditional news stories in readership, satisfaction and image.

That’s according to “The Impact Study of Newspaper Readership” (PDF).

It was sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. For this study, researchers:

• Analyzed a representative sample of 100 newspapers from across the country
• Asked 37,000 readers 450 questions about their reactions to their newspaper
• Conducted a content analysis of 47,500 stories from the newspapers

The result: In “one of the most thought-provoking discoveries” of the study, researchers found that feature-style stories outperformed traditional news stories in readership, satisfaction and image.

What’s a feature-style story?

The Impact researchers make a strong distinction between feature stories and feature-style stories. If your chief technology officer has a huge collection of Disney figurines, and you decide to take a photo of him surrounded by plastic princesses for an intranet profile, that’s a feature story. Not a feature-style story.

But when you cover hard business, environmental, political, economic, scientific and other serious topics in the feature-style story structure, that’s a feature-style story. Feature-style writing, according to the researchers, is:

• More narrative, with a beginning, middle and end
• Often illustrates points through characters or anecdotes
• Likely to use more colorful language and a more playful writing style 

“A concern editors commonly express is that feature-style writing means ‘softening’ or ‘dumbing down’ the news,” said the researchers. “‘Feature-style’ is not a euphemism or proxy for ‘soft news.’ Writers can use feature-style writing to cover hard news stories without compromising the stories’ informational value or focus. We’re not describing a story type but a writing style.”

Feature-style stories, according to Impact:

1. Increase readership

Feature-style stories seem easier to read than the traditional inverted-pyramid news structure. (In this study, easy to read includes is relaxing to read and makes it easy to find what I’m looking for.) Making a message easy to read is one of the best ways to increase readership, the study found. That is, according to the study, the higher the score on easy to read, the more likely people are to:

• Read an information source more often
• Read it more completely
• Spend more time reading it

“Considering that only 5% of all politics stories are written in feature-style,” researchers wrote, “even one additional feature-style politics story per week would make a difference.”

What kind of difference could you make by adding features to your communications?

2. Increase satisfaction

The feature-style story structure boosts satisfaction in stories on topics including politics, sports, science and health. Newspapers with more feature-style political stories, for example, have readers who express higher satisfaction with their political coverage. Yet only 5% of all political stories are written in the feature style, according to the study.

Are you missing opportunities to boost your readers’ satisfaction with your messages?

3. Improve brand perception

Organizations that run more feature-style stories are seen as more:

• Fun
• Honest
• Intelligent
• Personable
• Neighborly
• In the know
• Thought provoking
• In touch with the values of readers

“There is strong evidence that an increase in the [number] of feature-style stories has wide-ranging benefits,” write the researchers. “It’s the [organizations] that incorporate feature-style writing in a broad range of topics that see the most benefit in brand perception.” That’s a pretty big impact.

___

Source: “The Power to Grow Readership: Research from the Impact Study of Newspaper Readership,” the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 2001

The post Feature article structure outperforms pyramid appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

How long is too long for the mobile screen?

“Only the biggest/most complex stories should go above 600 words,” counsels the BBC in its guide to writing news for the mobile screen. “But it is worth remembering that even a 500-word story looks long on mobile.”

“Even a 500-word story looks long on mobile.”

— BBC

That’s because the small screen makes columns narrower, so the story carries on for screen after screen after screen.

That doesn’t mean that people won’t read a longer piece on their phones.

“I might read a 24,000-word article that really interests me” on my phone.

— BBC mobile editor Nathalie Malinarich

“I might read a 24,000-word article that really interests me,” says BBC mobile editor Nathalie Malinarich, who reads most of her news on her phone.

1. Divide and conquer. Defer secondary content to secondary mobile screens.
2. Show what’s below the fold. Add a menu to let readers know what they can’t see on the first screen.
3. Excise the blah-blah text. Readers have no patience for filler on the phone.
4. Be concise and precise. When in doubt, leave it out.

The post Format long stories for mobile web reading appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

What if I told you there was a free tool available that would help you convince readers to read your messages more often, read them more completely and spend more time reading them? Would you use it?

And what if I told you there was another tool out there that reduced readership and made people stop reading sooner? Would you stop using it? How quickly would you get rid of it?

My friend, these tools exist. The first — the one that encourages reading — is the feature-style story structure. The second one, the one that reduces reading, is the inverted pyramid.

And if you don’t know, now you know.

Feature structure increases reading.

Feature-style stories are easier to read than the traditional inverted-pyramid news structure, according to “Impact,” a 2001 study led by the Readership Institute at Northwestern University and sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Making messages more “easy to read” is one of the best ways to increase readership, the study found. That is, according to the study, the higher the score on “easy to read,” the more likely people are to:

• Read the paper more often
• Read it more completely
• Spend more time reading it

“Easy to read” includes “is relaxing to read” and “makes it easy to find what I’m looking for.”

Inverted pyramids reduce reading.

Inverted pyramids, on the other hand, scored lowest in readership of four structures studied.

That’s according to “Ways With Words,” a 1993 project of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Poynter Institute, the St. Petersburg Times and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The inverted pyramid also tanked in getting the reader across the jump, which means it made people stop reading sooner.

Why? The pyramid starts out boring and “gets more boring as the reader reads down,” “Ways With Words” researchers said. Who needs to stick around for that?

AP uses features to ‘draw in the reader.’

One solution: Write more feature-style stories.

You won’t be alone. The Associated Press is now including a feature lead in addition to a news lead with every story it sends across the wire, according to The New York Times.

Why? The feature leads are more likely to “draw in the reader through imagery, narrative devices, perspective or other creative means,” according to the nation’s dominant news service.

Why not join the AP? After all, who would keep using a tool that doesn’t work when there’s a free tool out there that does?

The post Increase reading with your writing structure appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Brands that run more feature-style stories are seen as being more:

• Honest
• Fun
• Neighborly
• Intelligent
• Personable
• Thought-provoking
• In the know
• In touch with reader values

That’s according to “Impact,” a 2001 study led by the Readership Institute at Northwestern University and sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Want to get some of that for your brand? Run more feature-style stories.

The post Create a friendly writing structure appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Size does matter.

The longer your story, the less of it your readers will read — and the less likely they are to understand and act on it.

That’s according to 60 years of research correlating story length with readership, comprehension, decision-making — even jam buying and 401(k) plan participation.

“We take it, as a given, that the more information decision makers have, the better off they are,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. But “all that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all … In fact [it’s] more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues.”

Increase reading by 33%.

Wilbur Schramm, the “father of communication studies,” was one of the first people to study the effect of story length on reading. In 1947, he interviewed 1,050 readers about what they read, how much and why they stopped. He found that …

• A nine-paragraph-long story lost three out of 10 readers by the fifth paragraph.
• A shorter story lost only two.

That’s the 33% reading gap between a short piece and a longer one. Bottom line: The longer your piece, the less of it they’ll read.

Leave them wanting more.

In his Broadway musical “Fame Becomes Me,” Martin Short quotes another Broadway actor as saying, “Leave them wanting less.” This study shows that the reverse is, of course, better advice.

Want people to read more of your piece? Make it shorter.

___

Source: William H. DuBay, Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text, Impact Information (Costa Mesa, California), 2007

The post Less is more appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

So much for the SEC’s new rules requiring companies to write more clearly about executive compensation.

This year’s compensation discussion and analysis (CD&A) sections — the first crop created under the new SEC mandate — are almost impossible to read.

“Many shareholders say the new proxies require more work, not less, to decipher,” writes Eric Dash, an economics reporter for The New York Times.

“Pay consultants say some of the new data is so dizzying that they are not sure how to sift through it; some charts even require another set of charts to interpret them. And a new section in proxies, meant to explain clearly how executives are compensated, is overrun with mind-numbing corporate-speak and legalese.”

Lynn E. Turner, a former S.E.C. chief accountant, agrees.

“‘It’s like reading through Tolstoy’s War and Peace,'” the managing director of research at Glass, Lewis & Company, a proxy research firm in San Francisco, told The New York Times.

‘What is missing is a clear, succinct story about how the compensation committee came to the amount they were going to pay.'”

Like reading Harvard Law Journal

In fact, the reports are as dense as academic papers, according to Clarity! Communications’ analysis of 40 companies’ CD&As. Using three common readability metrics, the tests showed that:

• The median length was 5,472 words. The shortest was 1,500 words; the longest, more than 13,500 words. A 13,500-word piece would take the average American more than an hour to read (though it might take longer to understand).
• The average CD&A used complex words — words of three syllables or more — nearly one-third of the time.
• The average Gunning-Fox index score came in at 16.45, about the same as an academic paper.
• The average Flesch Reading Ease score was 34.86 — about the same as the Harvard Law Journal. Only about one-third of American adults can read at this level, according to The Accessibility Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.
• The average Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level was 11.41, or “fairly difficult.” However, the test Clarity! used only goes up to grade 12. So the real average is likely higher: 13 CD&As reached the highest grade level possible on the test.

What happened to transparency?

“It’s somehow fitting that officials use a big, foggy word like ‘transparency’ when what they really mean is ‘not lying’ and ‘not hiding what we’re really doing.’ But that doesn’t sound as nice or vague, does it?” writes John Schwartz in The New York Times.

“But now that the disclosure forms are rolling in, experts say that if anything, the S.E.C. has achieved opacity. There is so much information that you can’t see the forest for the non-tax-qualified deferred compensation. The disclosure forms run dozens of pages, with so much swirling data and paper that they form a cloud, like the foil chaff that fighter jets drop to confound radar.”

Schwartz describes the disclosure forms as running “dozens of pages, with tables, footnotes and the kind of language that makes your hair hurt.”

Does your copy make your readers’ hair hurt? Find out by using three readability tests.

SEC calls for clearer writing

Proxy statements have become so complex that investors need “a Sherpa guide and a magnifying glass” to figure out what companies spend on executive compensation, according to investor groups.

Now the SEC is mandating that companies write more clearly about executive compensation. That’s information that has too often been hidden in the fine print or obscured by vague language in the past, critics say.

Want to make sure readers can find your point without a Sherpa and magnifying glass? Download the SEC’s fine, free guide to clear writing, “A Plain English Handbook.”

___

Sources: Eric Dash, “Executive Pay: A Special Report; More Pieces. Still a Puzzle,” The New York Times, April 8, 2007

“Readability of Executive Compensation Disclosures,” Clarity! Communications, March 1, 2007

John Schwartz, “Executive Pay: Essay; Transparency, Lost in the Fog,” The New York Times, April 8, 2007

Jonathan Peterson and Kathy M. Kristof, “More Data on Pay at the Top Is Mandated The SEC votes to require more-detailed, ‘plain English’ disclosure of executive compensation,” Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2006

The post CEO pay disclosures ‘like reading <i>War and Peace</i>’ appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Why make copy clearer and more readable?

In “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” two researchers at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) list these reasons:

• Messages are becoming more complex.
• Attention spans are shrinking.
• Audience members have learned to expect clearer communications.
• People sometimes accuse organizations of deliberately obfuscating information.

6 fallacies of complex communication

Why, then, do we persist in muddying our messages? One reason, the authors say, may be that we believe that complex communications are more:

• Authoritative
• Immune to criticism
• Complete
• Appealing to approvers
• Sophisticated
• Credible

Problem is, write authors Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D, and Nicole Bischof, these assumptions “are based on the premise that the receivers of a complex message will blame themselves for not understanding it.”

And that’s not true in this information-rich world, where if you don’t communicate the message clearly, someone else will.

Besides, write Eppler and Bischof, years of research on persuasive communications show that messages are credible and convincing only if audience members connect with them. And nobody connects with overly complicated information.

___

Source: Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D., and Nichole Bischof, “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” University of St. Gallen, November 2011

The post Why is clarity so important? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Making a publication “easy to read” is the No. 1 way to increase readership.

If newspapers (and, by extension, other publications) become more “relaxing to read” and make it easier “to find what I’m looking for,” people will:

• Spend more time reading the publication
• Read it more completely
• Read it more often

That was a key finding of “Impact,” a study by the Readership Institute.

How do you make it easy to read?

• Include more “go and do” information. This “news you can use” is the information readers need to take action on a story. Only 10 percent of all newspaper stories include it.
• Use the feature-style story structure instead of the inverted pyramid more often.
• Promote content more effectively. Do a better job of advertising your stories to make it easier for readers to find what they’re looking for.

___

Source: “Understanding and Improving ‘Easy to Read’ Content,” Readership Institute

The post No. 1 way to increase readership appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

If I told you there was a communication tool that reduces readership, diminishes understanding and causes engagement to take a nosedive, would you use it?

Friends, there is such a tool, and I am afraid you are using it every day. It’s called the inverted pyramid. And, according to “Ways With Words,” a classic study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, it does “not work well with readers.”

The problem with the pyramid

“Ways With Words” researchers studied four story structures and found that traditional, inverted-pyramid stories:

• “Do not work well with readers,” and “did not justify their predominance in today’s newspapers.”
• Scored low in readership and understanding.
• Made a mediocre showing in “involvement,” or whether the story made readers care about the news. (In our business, we call this “engagement.”)
• Were the least effective at getting the reader to the jump of all story forms studied.

Researchers identified two problems with the inverted pyramid:

• “The story gets more boring as the reader reads down.”
• “Journalists put background and context in the second half of the pyramid, so the reader who does not know that background cannot understand the top of the story. As a result, only journalists and sources can fully understand inverted-pyramid stories.”

Why are we still using this thing?

Back away from the pyramid.

Instead of sticking with a story form that’s been proven in the lab not to work, you’d think writers would experiment with other story structures. But, the researchers lamented:

Amen.

The post Think outside the pyramid for writing structure appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..