All the News: Directing Your Readers through Short-Form Content

Your magazine’s news pages shouldn’t remind readers of Times Square.

News — and other short-form content sections — present magazine editorial teams with some hard choices. On the one hand, you want your audience to take in as many of the separate stories as possible. It follows that each one be given an equitable design treatment that gives it a fighting chance to be read and retained.

But there’s an inherent problem that becomes especially thorny when politics — organizational politics, that is — and egos become involved: You can’t treat every story equally. It’s not possible.

Here’s why: Assuming you’re creating a publication in English or some similar Western language, your readers have been trained to navigate each page from left to right, top to bottom. Likewise, they’re accustomed to weighing the first story more heavily than the stories that follow. This is how we consume news in every other format. The most important story leads the broadcast, the web page or the newspaper’s front page.

“But,” you wearily object, “Our executive director and our president are both represented in different stories this issue. How can we choose which one is more important?”

I’m sorry. I sympathize. I’ve been there. But choose, you must.

This is the unspoken autocracy at the heart of every magazine. You are constantly making editorial decisions on behalf of your readers, putting their needs (or preferences, at worst) ahead of your own. Your choices of stories and artwork are all informed — at least, they should be — by an editorial platform that addresses the ongoing concerns of your audience.

But they’re still your choices. Readers not only expect this; they require it.

The establishment of a strong and clear editorial hierarchy helps to assure your audience that they’ve made the right call in entrusting their attention to your magazine. It reinforces a tacit belief that experts are appropriately sifting the publication’s content, organizing it to best inform and motivate a readership that has other things on its mind.

When those readers encounter a page that has clearly been organized to feature two or more stories equally, their reaction should not be characterized as an appreciation for the relative importance of the competing topics. Instead, it’s confusion. You’ve now made the reader responsible for determining the hierarchy of these stories. “This story in the top left corner of the page isn’t as big as the story under it. Why? What am I missing?”

While this is clearly a First World Problem, it’s still not the reader’s job to make these determinations. It’s yours.

As for addressing the warring executives example used above, it’s often helpful to fall back on technical explanations when explaining to an unhappy boss why a story must be relegated to second place. Perhaps the supplied photo of the groundbreaking ceremony didn’t convey the same energy as the photo of the keynote address from the annual meeting. Or wasn’t large enough. Or maybe one story was submitted at 300 words while the other came in at 75.

Once again, this is where the autocracy of expertise is yours to wield. Use this power responsibly, but for your magazine’s sake, please use it.

What other devices do successful magazine teams use to help readers navigate their content? Get in touch with Quarto Creative; we have ideas you may not have considered: contact@quartocreative.com.