This multimedia presentation on mobile technology was created using VuVox and includes video excerpts with David LaFontaine. LaFontaine delivered a presentation at the 2009 ONA Conference titled “Creating Content with Your Phone.”

Lauren Gentile is a sophomore at American University and Abby Selden is a senior at Belmont University. They were reporting on the conference with the 2009 ONA student newsroom.

ONA Conference workshops have focused almost exclusively on North American issues and trends.  But one session, “The State of Global Innovation,” brought an international perspective. Editors from Spain, Germany, Mexico and Brazil converged to discuss how they are keeping their publications fresh and relevant.  “Unique conditions in each of these countries produce unique responses,” said moderator James Brinier, director of Universidad de Guadalajara’s center for digital journalism.  Here’s a sample of what they had to offer:

From Brazil: Going mobile

There are only 180 million mobile subscribers in Brazil, said O Globo Executive Editor Raquel Almeida, but she believes the technology is about to take off.  “Something huge is coming,” she said, and O Globo is trying to stay ahead of the curve by offering news on every available platform and keeping up communication with its readers.

For O Globo, this has meant building a mobile Web site that allows readers to vote and comment and creating a mobile app that lets readers submit stories and photos directly to the newsroom.  “We gave this to our readers, then suddenly people were sending reports from all over the city,” said Almeida.  “We had eyes and ears all over the place.”

Spain: Innovating Social Content

Newsrooms across America are scrambling to integrate Twitter into reporting, but Madrid-based news site soitu.es is heading in the opposite direction.  Twitter can be a great source of information, said soitu Director Borja Echevarria. “But we believe it shouldn’t be the only one.”

Twitter crashes, it doesn’t allow users to post photos in a stream, and it can’t be used to post an interview anyone can follow, Echevarria said.  So instead of building a Twitter application, soitu built its own social network, utoi, and devoted the top right column of its homepage to displaying utoi content.   The feed has text, links and photos contributed by both community members and soitu reporters.  Controlling its own social network has allowed soitu to benefit from user engagement but still allows editorial staff to filter and prioritize what makes it onto the site. Utoi launched just 15 days ago, Echevarria said, and they’re working to develop utoi widgets and other tools to keep the network spreading. “It’s very important for us to experiment, to innovate.”

Germany: Staying Sticky

The vast majority of traffic to Spiegel Online’s German and English sites is direct, reports Spiegel International Editor Daryl Lindsey.  Many users keep Spiegel Online as their homepage–especially the German edition, for which only 10 percent of the traffic comes from search engines.  To keep repeat visitors, the site needs a constant supply of fresh, unique content.  “We’re a shovelware-free zone,” Lindsey said.

Spiegel International does experiment with community-generated content, but professionally produced text-and-photo journalism is still the core of the site, says Lindsey.  What makes this possible is a staff of 100 journalists in a Web-only newsroom.  Other German publications cut staff after the dot.com crash, but Spiegel online held staffing steady and has since been increasing.  “In five years we might have the same crisis that’s happening here with the San Francisco Chronicle,” concedes Lindsey. But for now, Spiegel online is going strong–the Web-only newsroom has been turning a profit since 2007.

Isabel Esterman is a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. She is working in the student newsroom at ONA’09.

Words drive users of the Web, say the Internet’s wordsmiths. Bury the words in dense paragraphs or between a maze of images and users will grow impatient and change course, continuing their quest for information elsewhere.

“Think of your Web audience as lazy, selfish and ruthless,” said Michael Gold, West Gold Editorial principal. “Web audiences are on a mission—they’re task-oriented.”

Gold was one of four speakers headlining “Yep, Text Still Matters,” an ONA09 discussion devoted to the craft of writing for the web.

Get Over Your Print Past

Writing for the Internet requires a clear, concise style with lots of sub headlines and bullet points and highlighting of key terms, said the panelists.

Gold, who began his career in print, was unsentimental about shaking the ways of newspapers and magazines.

“Get over it,” he told the audience. “You have to leave go of all the artifacts of print and move on.”

Text matters on the Web from Martin Ricard on Vimeo.

Text still matters on the Web from Online News Association on Vimeo.

The F Shape

If Internet users can’t find what they’re looking for, they will move on, said panelist Hoa Loranger, director of Nielsen Norman Group and author of “Prioritizing Web Usability.”

Users spend, on average, 25 seconds on a home page and only 47 seconds on secondary pages, according to her studies. This means writers and designers need to make a huge impact on a user immediately. ”The first two words, the first two paragraphs, the first twos of things are very important for the Web,” Loranger said.

By way of example, Loranger directed the room’s attention to heat maps that tracked the gaze of an average user on a site. Large blobs of red peppered the map at the beginnings of paragraphs, then smaller dots marked up the rest in an “F” formation.

Subconsciously, people will skip the items they aren’t looking for and this often includes pictures that might look like glossy advertisements. Pictures can often become an obstacle course to the information a user is seeking, Loranger said. People tend to focus on words.

Take Out the Scalpel

But a wall of text is not the answer, the panelists said. Web writers need to use proper “Web format technique” to increase visibility, they said.

“More clarity and more engagement? Shouldn’t we be doing that anyway?” Gold said. “Think of writing for the human searchers.”

Gold presented before and after makeovers of articles posted on CooksIllustrated.com and nytimes.com to illustrate how to “webify” content to make it scanner-friendly. In Gold’s versions, the information remained the same, but shorter with bullet points and subheads. Images were also demoted from the top of the page to the bottom.

“Take out that editor scalpel and make it shorter,” he said. “That’s life or death stuff.”

A New Guide

Yahoo! Senior Editorial Director Christopher Barr echoed Gold’s remarks, adding a number of technical rules of his own.

• The word “email” should contain no dash (unless you follow Associated Press style, which uses “e-mail”)
• Eliminate “always” and “of the.”
• Front-load headlines and avoid puns “like the plague.”

Bar has codified these guidelines and more for his own Strunk and White for the Web. Due next summer, he reports it will contain 139,000 words.