Mario Garcia encouraged
seminar participants to change
their modes of operation and
leave with a new way of doing
their jobs. (QuickTime Movie xxK)
Throw out the inverted pyramid and grab a champagne glass. You are on the Web now, and newspaper rules just don't apply here.

Newspaper people are a very homogeneous group of people," says Mario Garcia, a Poynter Affiliate for Visual Journalism. "In the online world, you have more of a mix. . . . Online staffs bring a new dimension."

Web sites, he says, tend to have more in common with books than with newspapers. Unfortunately, news Web sites still use the "newspaper metaphor" online.

Newspapers by design are intended for the masses, whereas the Web -- for now, anyway -- is highly selective. In other words, just as with books, people have a good idea of the kind of information they will find when they go to a news site.

Take out a book and look at it.

What do you see?

Garcia sees a comfortable reading environment. There is a title page, index then the meat or content. A closer examination reveals well-defined pages: There are titles and subtitles and good sized photos balanced with just enough text and white space.

Now take a look at your own Web site.

What do you see?

If yours is like many news sites, there is little white space, lots of tiny photos and graphics and a lot of text that gives no one piece of information importance over another.

"People want to read. People want to see white space. People want to see some graphics," Garcia says. "When you look at books, they have what people want to see, but Web sites are not built like that."

Writing With Style

In journalism classes and newsrooms, we learn the five Ws and the inverted pyramid style of writing. The inverted pyramid made its appearance during the Civil War. For online, it's probably time to break the mold.

Experiment with what Garcia calls the champagne glass. In this genre the story is told in smaller chunks, with excitement renewed every 21 lines or so, he says. This helps the reader maintain interest throughout the storyteller's piece, which is similar to what happens in a good novel, he says.

"Writing has to be good to keep you going," says Garcia.

Reading & Writing Renaissance

Today, we are experiencing a writing Renaissance, which will lead to a reading Renaissance, Garcia says.

"We are all information designers," he says. "You are going to be storytellers, but how you tell that story is going to be a lot different."

This, says Garcia, is a new medium for a new century. While some of the elements may be rooted in print, online is not an imitation of print. Advertising for example now coexists, and sometimes takes the more dominant place on the Web page, he says.

"We live in a multimedia society," Garcia says. "As an information designer, you'll just have to know who you're serving the soup for."