A new linearity is important when writing for the smartphone

I have been following Mario García for years, one of the most famous newspaper designers in the world, who among other things best personifies the American dream: a Cuban refugee boy arrived in Florida, without knowing a word of English, he became a journalist and then a visual designer, up to designing newspapers on all platforms and teaching it at Columbia University's school of journalism.

He lived through the entire transformation of newspapers, from typesetting to digital: he brought color to the pages of very serious newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the German Die Zeit; he reduced their format without making them look like tabloids, on the contrary; gave the Washington Post its current guise; has created the digital editions of many newspapers around the world.

“Visual journalism: a way to encourage reading, a way to bring visual excitement to the pages of newspapers that had traditionally been long masses of gray text.”

And in fact the first volume of his new trilogy The Story is entitled Transformation . The second, decidedly more interesting and current, Storytelling (the Kindle edition costs less than 5 euros). While waiting for the third one dedicated to design, I've read both, I haven't been satisfied with reading your posts for years.

I follow a newspaper designer so assiduously mainly because:

• big newspapers like the ones that call Mario García as a consultant have the resources to experiment a lot and do things big: their solutions are an inspiration for anyone who writes online, whatever
• the newspaper industry has been struggling for years to find ways to get read, cultivate and increase their subscribers: if they find a way to concentrate long and complex texts on the smallest surfaces, we can steal ideas even for sites and blogs
• our Cuban-American designer is generous and very communicative, he tells us and shows us a lot of interesting things.

The Story, laid out like the screenshots of a smartphone, but with classic and even vintage fonts (Bembo for the text, Deutsche Gothic for the titles), is a hymn to history, indeed to good stories, which are the basis of any journalistic piece on any medium. What makes books so interesting are the solutions that Garcia has found to make articles, especially the longer ones, extremely readable on the few square centimeters of our phones.

“If we have a good story the rest is easy.”

Today stories can have "short legs": a short and quick breaking news on the site, a few lines on social media, but immediate, and it ends there. Or they may have "long legs" and lend themselves to insights and dossiers to be published even at a certain distance in time, such as the very rich ones of the New York Times or the Washington Post. In both cases, however, the texts must consider the new "journalism of interruptions", consumed everywhere, all the time by about 80% of the world's population who read them on the phone. Law, yes, law, because despite everything we are getting used to reading even very long texts on the mini-screen.

“The smartphone, the smallest platform, but the one your audience keeps as a constant companion.”

98% of people keep their screen vertical: scrolling outclasses swiping . For this García proposes a "new linearity" for the texts, which favors the speed with which our thumb advances the contents on the screen. A linearity made up of a rhythmic alternation of short paragraphs of text, images, captions, videos, graphics, quotations, captions, subtitles. If well orchestrated, they allow us to handle/read texts of several tens of thousands of characters with ease and lightness. The major dailies have listened to him and the reading figures prove them right.

We sweep across the press with our eyes, grasping the context of the textual "landscape"; on the smartphone we are concentrated on scrolling and the rhythm is all played out in that narrow ribbon of words and images.

Which stories are best suited for unrolling and how should they be designed to captivate and keep the reader hooked?

1. They must have strong visual potential, to be expressed through photos, videos, graphics, quotes, screenshots. Like the famous story of the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in the New York Times (also in Italian):

How many visual elements? Between 5 and 6. Videos must not exceed 30 seconds.

And can you mix photos and videos? Yes, but as little as possible.

Attention: if you insert a screenshot from a social network, for example a tweet, this must not repeat things already said in the text. Indeed, ban all repetitions: each element must be unique and advance the story.

2. Titles and subtitles are essential to always push the reader forward: between evocation and description, but never cryptic. To do this, the subtitle can help us:

3. The text must be simple: short paragraphs, each one a focus; short periods, because the narrow text column makes them seem even longer. The richness of content and style is entrusted to the lexicon and the integration between text and visual.

“In the mobile world, it is not just that less is best, less is the only way.”

4. The incipit is decisive: it is better to plunge into the story "in medias res", to nail the reader to find out how we got there or what is about to happen, as in the long New York Times report dedicated to the fall of Aleppo in Syria:

5. Captions are essential : they connect text and images, they constitute an additional entry point, they convey important messages. “I'm only going for the things that I'm passionate about” says this intimate Nicole Kidman in black and white in the caption. Let's continue reading to find out what these things are that she is so passionate about.

6. The end of the paragraph announces or refers to the image that comes after:

7. Empty spaces are expressive spaces:

In short, the real interaction is increasingly between our thumb and the unrolling screen. Do you remember The Snow Fall? The great New York Times web-documentary that in 2012 won awards and even won a Pulitzer? It was well written, but full of links and special effects: despite the awards and the undoubted quality, very few read it in its entirety.

Instead now another true story of a rescue after an avalanche, built with the linearity recommended by Mario García, keeps us glued to the smartphone. It took me half an hour to read it, always with bated breath, but I got to the bottom without realizing it: it's Five Feet Under , published by the Norwegian newspaper Bergens Tidende (in English):