emotionalmarkup

Here’s an exercise we were taught in writing school to help free our minds from the conciseness and blandness used by politically-correct trogologytes with nothing better to do than to force us all to use non-figurative, monosyllabic grunts expressly devised to be comprehensible to a sock puppet.

What you do is think of someone you know well and write ten metaphorical sentences about them. It starts by thinking:

“If my friend were a vehicle, what type of vehicle would he/she be?”

The answer might be something like:

“She is a wheat harvester on its back wheels.”

The idea is taken from a poet, whose named I cannot remember, who used this device to describe English poet laureate, Ted Hughes.

For example, here’s one I made up about a person I know:

His shoulders are two oversized furcoats, draped over a telegraph pole.
His voice, a shotgun ringing through a bowling alley on a Saturday night.
His eyes blink over an early evening at the equator.
He uses his nose like a vacuum cleaner sucks up marbles.

As you can see, you can create a fairly vivid image of a person through the association of ideas. My example is rubbish, but give it a go, it’s not only simple but fun - like throwing a hair dryer in the fish tank.

The convergence of media has given rise to some strange bedfellows. Once upon a time a news room was filled with copy editors, journalists, photographers, phones blaring, and daily deadlines. Now it’s more common to see plasma screens, banks of computers, a multimedia department and us - the proud web developer.

A good working relationship between developers and the “journos” takes some time to forge: it depends on the environment and the willingness of both parties to accept and comprehend each others’ roles. But because these roles are so different, misunderstandings are inevitable. In some places, I’ve noticed a level of antagonism arise between the two groups where each regard the other as an ignorant impediment to their own jobs.

Developers take great pains to craft and maintain clean and compliant code and become disillusioned with the editors’ constant and successful attempts to break it. They can’t fathom how an editor would input 100 break tags to clear an image and consider a little piece of coding knowledge in an eager writer to be a dangerous thing. To a developer, an editor is someone whose basic role is akin to data entry. It is inconceivable that they should require any other skill beyond copy and paste and HTML tags beyond <h2> and <p>.

Editors on the other hand, think that developers are a team of geeks who, because they don’t want to do any work, enforce draconian rules on the publishing process and stifle any attempt at creativity. Editors feel that developers don’t understand a thing about the craft of news writing and the importance of timely and topical messages. They use acronyms to confuse and hide behind their inability to deliver what an editor wants.

Wording, coding and loading

Fortunately, I’ve been in both chairs. As a writer hacking away at a desktop word processor composing articles destined for the web, I was on intimate terms with the way text had to be “cleaned and gleaned” before it was suitable to be published as HTML. Any variations on the template (usually defined by designers) had to be fudged or “requested”, meaning that a designer had to create them and a client side developer had to provide the code. In a news environment, more so in an online environment where we can break and update stories when and from where we please, this is a huge frustration.

So too having worked with editors and journalists across many industries in a development capacity, I have heard their frustrations with regards to technology: “Why should we have to learn HTML and CSS? Don’t we employ people to take care of that for us?”

My answer was always that they should learn simple HTML and perhaps a little CSS, or at least what it’s used for, and that I would offer to teach them what they needed to know. Some accepted and others spurned the offer as if I’d just invited them to watch moss grow on roof tiles. But I understood their complaints. Arguably, more than in any other sector, the media and entertainment industries are experiencing profound changes due to the rise and rise of the internet. Concurrently, all the platforms, a great deal of the content, the language and yes, the roles are changing with it.

In today’s web-focused newsrooms the journalist is expected to not only produce the content but to publish it at well using whatever tool is provided for them. They’ve been employed to write, edit, research and provide the content that keeps people coming to the site, but the variable output of content management systems and the strict rules that are required to maintain a website that validates create a digital minefield. Training and documentation might be non-existent, technology changes but the pressures to submit their copy in a presentable format remain the same. For example, if a means to create a breakout quote is not available to the editor, who has to immediately push out a breaking story, they will improvise and we, the support staff who look after the integrity of the site may come across something like this:

<p ALIGN=LEFT><b>
<font size="3" color="red">
"And a minister said something interesting."<br>
</font>
<i>The Hon Henry Honeybun</i>
</b>
</p>


The writers don’t care. Their material is out and they’ve done their job. Any self-respecting web developer however is prone to suffer a mild spasm. Larger organisations that can afford to hire technical support staff who can respond to these events straight away have mitigating buffers. But the night desks and smaller news teams will publish what they can get away with, despite breaking the layout or every rule in the HTML validator.

Who’s right?

It might be a gratuitously evident comment, but people publishing content to the web - whatever that content may be - should have the tools and knowledge available to them to do so. Saying I work as a writer shouldn’t negate the necessity for me to understand the medium in which I publish. I should know what I can and can’t do and follow the advice of the developers.

But, it goes both ways.

If I am a developer (responsible for the front end of a news website), it’s important for me to know how about how a newsroom works and the role of journalists. It’s also worthy to understand how people in my team will be publishing to the site and providing adequate support for them to do their jobs properly. Providing the right tools is only a part of this. Attaching a digital style guide to the formal style guide is one option. Proper training is another.

Despite the gaps in the knowledge of both parties, I think we are at the tail-end of the transition and that we will see a new generation of journalists who will have had training in web publishing. Accordingly I hope that we’ll see a new breed of developers, particularly those bloggers, who appreciate the art of the word and the importance of a journalist’s or editor’s role in the creation of news. Ultimately we’re both producing lines to achieve the same end: whether they’re words or code, our medium is online and our audiences shouldn’t have to know that there’s a difference between the two.

I recently helped a colleague rebuild his site the CSS way after he’d spent hours at home trying to do it himself. This guy was no computer novice - he’s a fine python/ruby programmer and writes Linux applications in his spare time, but he just couldn’t get the whole logic of CSS and how it related to elements on the page. I understood his frustration.

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London is a city in which you see-saw between feelings of optimism and despair. Optimism flows from the endless source of ways to amuse yourself. If you have money or the will or both, the question of “What will we do tonight?” is one of the easiest to answer as there are cultural and social activities frothing from just about every orifice of the city’s concrete hide. However, despair lurks close by and will attack without notice causing you to forget all of this and drown yourself in a grey turmoil of bad weather, food and grim surroundings. A reliable way to shift from the former to the latter is through public transport.

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Pagination is a great tool for presenting data. It breaks up large volumes of information into formats and amounts that our brains and browsers can handle. Search engine results, photo galleries and e-books are all good examples of where logical page breaks make a difference to the user experience. Yet sometimes we come across an inappropriate use of pagination that decreases usability - news articles for example.

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There’s a queer sensation I get when about to write something that someone else will be reading - even if the probability of my words touching the retinas of another human being is far less than that of George Lucas creating a summer blockbuster about Jar Jar Binks - I draw up a blank. I don’t know what to write. It’s like eating soup with chopsticks.

So, picking up on an exercise I once read, whereby, instead of staring at you monitor wondering why the BBC hasn’t updated its RSS feed in the last five seconds, you describe the torment of your writer’s block and hope to uncover a terrific idea or unleash a flow of something legible and interesting. The theory is that through simply initiating the process you are “warming up” your writing muscles in preparation for exercise. (Actually I prefer the Hemingway method whereby you lubricate your brain cells to a level sufficient for creative output).

Alas for me, it just makes me want to shovel out nonsense in the hope that I may avoid articulating an opinion, or forming an argument about something that arrested my interest ten minutes ago but which has now become as interesting as the Wall Street Journal is to a blind dog with no anus (just in case the dog in fact could read or wanted to shit on the paper, circumstances in which it could be argued that dogs might find the WSJ interesting), or fly shit is to just about everyone. That being said, I do admire those who can so deftly compose a rounded essay on a topic with engaging facts and just enough humour to raise an eyebrow or piss oneself hysterically, depending on the location of the reader. Hundreds of said articles are written every day. Can you find one? It’s a great waste of company time.

How do they do it I wonder? “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working” - some mildly famous painter once said. So I decided to draw a picture of SuperGeekess in black biro. Still waiting…

“Adapt or perish”, “turn new corners”, “invest in people”: yeah ok, enough already. If you haven’t already heard about the rise and rise of online news then you may not have had the pleasure of hearing such responses to the perceived challenge of the internet from media executives. But if all the hysteria and rapid investment in the web by media companies is any gauge, then there is actually some substance to what they are saying.

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