News Doesn’t Belong on a Wrist
When Apple announced it was debuting the Apple Watch back in 2015, it was met with a lot of mixed reviews. The watch was so new and had so much potential, but nobody knew what the scope of that potential could or would be. Business Insider released a video shortly after the Apple Watch was released where people tried it on for the first time to give their thoughts on it. One woman in the video said, “I expected it [the Apple Watch] to make life easier, but it seems like it’s just adding things to life that are not necessary.” Another woman in the video said, “It’s a lot of money for a device that I own [a phone] can already do.”
Even a year and a half later, those thoughts still seem to sum up reactions to the Apple Watch, especially for journalists and news consumers.
The development of the Apple Watch was great because it allowed news organizations to do two important things: send rapid up-to-date notifications to Apple Watch wearers in breaking news situations, and let wearers have quick access to stories they might want to read for leisure.
A press release from The New York Times stated their goal for the Apple Watch was, “one-sentence stories, crafted specially for small screens, [that] will provide the news at a glance across many Times sections, including business, politics, science, tech and the arts.” For journalists this meant they had to create clear, concise and powerful headlines (with as few words as possible) with the goal of taking someone’s attention away from whatever they were doing to get them to focus on the article.
There was one huge problem. The Apple Watch’s 38 (or 42) millimeters screen size only allows for a few words of the headline to be seen before it says, “for more information, open the story in the app on your phone.” It seems as though if someone wanted to read an article on their phone, they would just open it on their phone first and not even bother with the watch. The screen isn’t large enough to include photos or videos that could draw a reader in nor is it large enough to post the entire article. Nobody has the time or patience to scroll through a 1,000-word article on the watch. It would probably show about three words per line and would definitely take longer compared to just reading the article on a phone.
The New York Times reported that in 2000, the average reader’s attention span was 12 seconds. Now, in 2016, the NYT says the average reader’s attention span is 8 seconds.
To put it into perspective, it takes about 8 seconds to say two average-length sentences. News organizations have within the time it takes you to say “hi, my name is so and so. I am from this place and like doing this hobby” to grab your attention and suck you in. It’s not a lot of time.
Shortened headlines have also been known to cause confusion because the web producers/writers for the apps can’t include all of the details of the story. For example, CNN posted the headline, “1st woman to climb Everest dies” on their app and sent out the alert to Apple Watch wearers. Anyone who received that notification would assume that the first woman to successfully climb Mount Everest died, likely while climbing the mountain…but that wasn’t the case at all.
Junko Tabei, the first woman to climb Mount Everest, died in a hospital after a battle with cancer at the age of 77.
CNN could have avoided this mistake by writing its Apple Watch headline this way: “First Woman to Climb Everest Dies of Cancer.” Yet because the character limit is so small on the Apple Watch, the editors evidently chose to cut the most important part of the story to make the headline fit — the fact the woman died from cancer, not from her journey up the mountain. On the website, CNN included that she died from cancer. There shouldn’t be discrepancies between the Apple Watch and a website.
As journalists, it’s our job to maintain truthful headlines with unbiased stories attached to them. Since the Apple Watch has taken away one huge component — space — news organizations need to make sure they don’t compromise the integrity of their stories just to try and fit it on the screen. Being second and right is way more important than being first and wrong especially with how fast news can travel.
It’s important to remember that the Apple Watch is just an extension of an iPhone and therefore shouldn’t be looked at as a separate entity. Without the phone, the watch wouldn’t be able to work since it relies on the phone’s wifi/data connection, cellular service and applications. All of the stories that are on the apps for all of these new organizations have more capabilities than the Apple Watch.
For journalists I think the Apple Watch had a lot of potential, but due to the small screen size and lack of space to put headlines, it just falls short.
