2006.05甜蜜的等级制度

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Sweet Hierarchy
Online media could learn something about news hierarchy from their old-media brethren.

By William Powers
MAY 2006 ISSUE
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Digital technology has done beautiful things for us news consumers. Flip open your screen, and a raft of fresh headlines is always there waiting. The Net has taken that ancient saw of newspaper culture, "The Daily Miracle," and made it literal. The new world of news is miraculous, not just daily but all the time.

Still, there's one old-media habit I sometimes miss when I'm online. Newspapers and other predigital organs organized and presented the news in an intensely hierarchical fashion: Story X mattered more than story Z, they told you, using an elaborate system of signals. Which page was the story on? Where precisely on the page was it? How much space did it get? How big was the headline? Was there a photo?

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The code, which will undoubtedly live on as long as the paper media do, can get downright medieval in its distinctions. Did you know that the right-hand column of a broadsheet newspaper is immensely more important than the left-hand one—but only on the front page, above the fold?

This ancient system is so routinized and formal, it can seem silly. Besides, who cares what a bunch of inch-deep, self-important journalists think is important?

Online media are, in a way, the culture's answer to this question. For reasons both practical and philosophical, they present the news in a much less hierarchical fashion. On the practical level, a computer screen is just a two-dimensional surface, with far fewer potentially symbolic nooks and crannies than a thick sheaf of pages printed on both sides. True, there are virtual Web pages "behind" the front page of any Web site, and you can have multiple pages open at the same time. But because they are not literally attached to each other, not part of the same fixed structure, the whole machine is inherently less didactic and hierarchical. The online reader decides what matters, by clicking.

The limitless space available to digital media removes another hierarchical tool—the competition for real estate. If a newspaper lets a story run to 5,000 words, it's telling you the story matters. When an online outlet does the same thing, it's not necessarily telling you anything, except that you're reading a long story.




The digital world is far from hierarchy-free. It has lead stories, and huge screaming headlines. But in a studied way, the design of many digital sites' news leans away from telling you what matters most, often opting for simple lists of headlines and other anti-hierarchical features. On the classic blog, the only obvious hierarchy is chronology—items appear according to when they were posted, with the most recent items at the top. This turns the old notion of "play" into something more like anti-play, hinting that the blogger is just a passive conduit. Which is a bit of a canard: When and how content appears in any outlet is always a decision.

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Earlier this week, my hard copy of The New York Times arrived with the headline, "Politics Stalls Plan to Bolster Flood Insurance," in the primo position, top right corner of the front page. If I had seen that deadly dull headline listed on a Web site, without the cachet attached to this special spot in The Times, I'd probably have ignored it. But The Times, which is nothing if not hierarchical, wanted me to know that this was its premier hard-news story of the day. Not because it had won a popularity contest, which is effectively what happens on sites such as Google News, which tracks how broadly stories are playing across the Web and posts them accordingly. Nor was The Times pretending that this was an item that passively fell in its lap. "Look at THIS," the paper was saying, and thus revealing something about itself. Hierarchy can be more transparent than its opposite.

I put the paper down and called up Google News on my screen. At the top left was a CNN story about the president sending troops to the Mexican border—the big news of the moment everywhere. And just to the right, perched atop one of the most important news sites on Earth, was this headline: "AstraZeneca in Talks to Acquire Cambridge Antibody Technology."

Sometimes randomness is just random.

William Powers is a former columinst for National Journal and author of Hamlet's BlackBerry.



甜蜜的等级制度
网络媒体可以从他们的旧媒体兄弟那里学到一些关于新闻层次的东西。

作者：威廉-鲍尔斯
2006年5月号
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数字技术已经为我们的新闻消费者带来了美好的事物。翻开你的屏幕，一连串新鲜的头条新闻总是在那里等待着。网络已经把报纸文化的古老观点 "每日奇迹 "变成了现实。新的新闻世界是神奇的，不仅仅是每天，而是一直都在。

不过，当我上网时，有时还是会想念一个旧媒体的习惯。报纸和其他前数字机构以一种强烈的等级方式组织和展示新闻。他们用一套复杂的信号系统告诉你，故事X比故事Z更重要。这个故事在哪一页？它到底在哪一页？它的版面有多大？标题有多大？是否有照片？

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毫无疑问，只要纸质媒体存在，代码就会一直存在下去，它的区别可以说是中世纪的。你知道吗，大报的右栏比左栏重要得多，但只有在头版，在折页之上？

这个古老的系统是如此的常规化和正式，以至于它看起来很愚蠢。此外，谁会在乎一群寸步不离、自视甚高的记者认为什么是重要的呢？

在某种程度上，网络媒体是文化对这个问题的回答。由于实际和哲学方面的原因，它们以一种更少的等级方式呈现新闻。在实践层面上，电脑屏幕只是一个二维的表面，其潜在的象征性的角落和缝隙远远少于双面印刷的厚厚一沓书。的确，任何网站的首页 "后面 "都有虚拟网页，而且你可以同时打开多个网页。但是，由于它们在字面上并不是相互连接的，不是同一固定结构的一部分，所以整个机器本质上就没有说教性和层次性。在线读者通过点击来决定什么是重要的。

数字媒体的无限空间消除了另一个等级工具--对空间的竞争。如果一家报纸让一个故事写到5000字，那就是告诉你这个故事很重要。当一个在线媒体做同样的事情时，它不一定告诉你什么，除了你正在阅读一个长故事。




数字世界远非无等级之分。它有领先的故事，和巨大的尖叫的头条。但是，以一种研究的方式，许多数字网站的新闻设计偏离了告诉你什么是最重要的，往往选择简单的标题列表和其他反层次的功能。在经典的博客上，唯一明显的层次结构是时间顺序--项目根据它们被发布的时间出现，最近的项目在顶部。这就把旧的 "游戏 "概念变成了更像反游戏的东西，暗示博主只是一个被动的渠道。这有点儿荒唐：内容何时以及如何出现在任何渠道中，总是一个决定。

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本周早些时候，我的《纽约时报》硬拷贝到了，头版右上角的标题是："政治因素阻碍了加强洪水保险的计划"，处于首要位置。如果我在一个网站上看到这个枯燥无味的标题，没有《纽约时报》这个特殊位置所带来的好处，我可能会忽略它。但是，《泰晤士报》如果不分等级的话，就会想让我知道这是它当天最重要的硬新闻报道。这并不是因为它赢得了一场人气竞赛，这实际上是谷歌新闻等网站所发生的情况，它追踪故事在网络上的广泛传播，并相应地发布它们。泰晤士报》也没有假装这是一个被动地落在它头上的项目。该报说，"看看这个"，从而揭示了一些关于自己的信息。等级制度可以比它的反面更透明。

我放下报纸，在屏幕上调出谷歌新闻。左上角是CNN关于总统向墨西哥边境派兵的报道--当时各地的大新闻。而就在右边，位于地球上最重要的新闻网站之一的头条新闻是这样的。"阿斯利康正在商谈收购剑桥抗体技术"。

有时随机性就是随机的。

威廉-鲍尔斯（William Powers）是《国家期刊》的前专栏作家，也是《哈姆雷特的黑莓》的作者。