Chip on Your Shoulder

If you're an online news consumer, you already know what a blurb is, or you know it when you see it, even if you don’t have the vocabulary to name it. Here’s an example from a recent homepage of The New York Times.

The board of Merrill Lynch announced that E. Stanley O’Neal would retire immediately and Alberto Cribiore would serve as nonexecutive chairman.

To understand the role of the blurb, or summary, as some online journalists refer to the device, you have to see what comes on top of it: a hyperlinked headline.

Merrill Chooses Interim Leader, Begins Search for C.E.O.

The board of Merrill Lynch announced that E. Stanley O’Neal would retire immediately and Alberto Cribiore would serve as nonexecutive chairman.

Blurbs are designed to drive readers to the story. They are words that click. In that way, they are combination of newswriting and marketing. Like so many online forms, they have their historical roots in earlier times and technologies.

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Until the advent of the World Wide Web, blurbs were usually found only on book jackets or movie posters. Their origins are generally attributed to Gelett Burgess, an American humorist; in 1907, he created a fictitious character, "Miss Belinda Blurb," to say nice things about his new book.

Old-style blurbs were a marketing device that heaped excessive praise on a book. Often they were written by friends of the author, who then returned the favor. An imaginary example:

Online blurbs serve the same function: They are intended to keep readers reading by engaging their interest enough to click the headline, taking them to the full story.

Their use is widespread, according to Poynter’s 2003 Eyetrack study, "Online News Behavior in the Age of Multimedia."

"The vast majority of news Web sites' homepages," the study found, "use a combination of headlines and accompanying blurbs to entice site visitors to click through to stories."

Here are examples.

From England, the online edition of The Guardian:

From the Los Angeles Times:

Last L.A. 8 defendants cleared
By Henry Weinstein | 6:00 a.m.
After 20 years, U.S. drops charges against men accused of ties to terrorists.

From Russia, a blurb drives readers to the story of a bombing in a central Russian city, killing eight, injuring about 50:

And, closer to home, from Poynter Online:

What Does a 'Data Delivery Editor' Do?
By Ken Sands
At The Roanoke Times, he turns a variety of databases into easy-to-use online content.

Some news organizations use the term "summary" instead of blurb -- a reasonable choice, I’d say, as the item sums up what readers will find when they click on the linked headline on top. That’s the case at nytimes.com.

To learn more about this device, I did an email interview with Jill Agostino, news editor of nytimes.com.

Agostino will be teaching in my new seminar, “Online Writing: Words that Click,” Jan. 27-30, 2008. She’ll be joined by Becky Bowers, a St. Petersburg Times copy editor turned graphic reporter, and other specialists in online writing. The seminar is geared to reporters, editors, online producers and other journalists who write and edit for print, broadcast and online-only news sites. The application deadline is Dec. 17.

Q: How do you decide what online story gets a blurb on the homepage?

A: Those are news judgments. Generally, the stories we deem most important are the ones that get summaries, and the next most important stories get headlines under "more news."

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At night, we will follow the paper's A1 (page) to some extent, but it also depends on what time news is breaking. We may have a summary for a story that the paper has played inside; maybe some of the other stories they have on A1 we've had up since 11 in the morning — for our readers it's sort of old news. I talk with the homepage producer at night about them.

Q: What length do you shoot for?

A: Usually no more than three lines. (The article template allows us to know exactly how many lines it will come out to as we write it.) We tell people that you usually don't want to them to be more than 23 to 25 words (which comes out to roughly three lines), but obviously there are exceptions.

Q: A recent summary reads like a lead, but one shorter than the lead of the actual story.

The Federal Reserve today approved a half-percentage point cut in its discount rate on loans to banks, saying that it now feels that "tighter credit and increased uncertainty have the potential to restrain economic growth going forward." Stocks immediately surged when trading opened.

Is that deliberate?

A: Often, the lead of the story can act as a guide for the summary.

Q: What guidelines, besides length, do you rely on?

A: We don't really have hard and fast rules on these things, aside from the obvious ones: They have to make sense, be grammatically correct and accurately reflect the story. We have done some training sessions with the producers, and I try to point out things to the producers at night, but it obviously depends on how busy we are.

Q: Is the blurb/summary an online creation? Is there an analog in the print edition?

A: There really isn't anything that is like this in the print edition But, remember, they can look at the headline and immediately read the lead of the story right under it — our readers have to take an extra step and click through the headline. Hopefully the summary entices them to do so.