I love version 1.1s — that first post-launch release which bridges the gap between prophecy and reality. If there aren’t a lot of changes in your 1.1 you’re either a design genius or not paying attention. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, as the saying goes, so after three days compiling Suttonboro this is what I’ve learned.
1. Kill your babies
Suttonboro is supposed to be a serious digest of the news stories that matter in Sutton, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to slip in two of my own stories that wouldn’t have made the cut had they come from elsewhere. I’ve deleted them. It won’t be happening again.
2. Rewriting the headlines
Before I started, I imagined that the only editing I’d have to do would be story selection. Thus, once I’d found a good story all I’d have to do would be to paste the headline and its TinyURLd link into Twitter. Wrong.
In the Suttonboro Twitter feed, all you get is a headline and a link. There are no photos, no standfirsts nor any other supporting content. The headlines have to tell the whole story by themselves. This is no place to tease or to be cute or coy. You can click through to read the full details of the story but you shouldn’t have to do that just to find out what it actually is. If you’re reading the feed in an RSS reader, you have to click through twice as the whole Twitter update becomes a link to the individual Twitter post page, breaking the separate TinyURL link to the real story. So getting the headline right really matters.
For example, this original headline:
becomes:
UKIP’s Councillor Pickles to quit over “backstabbing and general bitchiness”
In this context, having the councillor’s name and party is significant and useful. You don’t need to click through just to discover which councillor is leaving or to imagine how this might affect the political composition of the council. Also, the original headline is inaccurate. The councillor will not be standing for re-election, but he hasn’t resigned already. Thus, it’s “to quit” rather than “quits”. By adding four words to the headline I’ve added two significant bits of information about the story and corrected an inaccuracy. That’s good.
Consistency of tone matters in these headlines too. Left unaltered, one from the Sutton Guardian might be tabloidesque, the next a self-congratulatory press release from the council. Both need to be edited back to a neutral mid-position that plays it straight and makes it easy for the reader to judge whether the story merits clicking through to read in full. While I haven’t gone back and edited the existing updates in the feed (not least because Twitter quite rightly doesn’t allow edits), in future the whole feed should be tonally consistent.
So:
becomes:
Council’s PR bill up by £200K
The pejorative and clichéd “spin doctor” gets neutralised to “PR” and we need to know that it’s the council’s PR bill if we’re to get the whole story from just the headline. It’s implicit that we’re talking about Sutton Council as this is a Sutton-specific feed.
3. Story selection
There’s always going to be an element of intuition about what’s right to include and what’s not, but the aim is to cover all the significant and serious stories in the borough with an emphasis on those that affect or are affected by public policy. For example I don’t include individual crime stories unless they suggest a change to law or policy, which would be more likely for a group of related cases than a single case anyway.
I’ll include any public policy issue that affects a large number of people or that affects a small number of people significantly. So while “Hospital u-turn on doctor charges” seems at first sight like a serious story, which it is, it’s not a very significant one. It affects a small group of people (junior doctors) in a relatively minor way (having to pay £36 for a CRB check).
What’s left out is as important as what’s put in. Anything that makes it harder for the reader to form an accurate and consistent expectation of what they’re likely to find in future harms more by its presence than by its absence. If you care about missing wizards’ cats or Dalek-decorated compost bins you probably already devour the Sutton Guardian whole anyway, so you won’t miss much by me excluding such things from Suttonboro.
Here’s to another successful three days and onward to version 1.2!