Jumps

Jumps:

If there is one easy-to-solve irritation that newspapers uniquely possess, it is the use of jumps. Pick up just about any daily newspaper and you’ll find a front page loaded with the start – but not the finish – of articles. The ends of the articles are always inside the paper.

This makes a certain sort of sense – people who want a broad overview of the most important stories (or who haven’t decided to plunk down their money for an issue) can read the front page. The most important bits of the most important news are presented front and center. Which is fine if you’re just interested in the front page.

If you want more in-depth information, and you want to be able to read your stories from beginning to end, your newspaper experience is like thus: Read page one, flip to page 4, flip back to page one, read page 5, flip back to page one, read section B1, get redirected to B2.

This would be absolutely appropriate if one were reading a “choose-your-own-adventure” book and not the president’s latest domestic proposals, news from the front of the latest war, and some guy you’ve never heard of before who has suddenly been revealed to have given bribes to a high-ranking public official. Jumps make reading a newspaper cover-to-cover a gymnastic experience that requires reading the newspaper in a number of different possible orders, none of them linear from page A1 to page D30.

The jumps themselves interrupt the flow of a story as well – a mildly interested person who would otherwise read an entire story might not feel that they should be bothered with reading the whole story if it drops off mid-sentence (and that goes counter to the journalistic imperative to inform the reader as much as possible.) Flipping from page to page also requires a different mode of thinking – so while readers are trying to process a story, they are suddenly confronted with a manual dexterity and math-counting problem, not a different one, but it jars them out of that mode of thinking and it is more difficult to resume the news-processing thinking from before.