Web-writing

The intentions on weblogs or online news sites should always be to keep it simple for the reader. It should be concise and quickly sum up the facts for the reader in the first sentence. With this in mind i decided to do a bit of investigative browsing and look at some of the popular mainstream sites to see if they fulfill this goal.

I looked at two english newpaper sites to see exactly how they went about keeping the reader through story structure,lay-out,web-writing etc.

The home page on the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk) is very interactive and the headlines instantly make sense with the main story being about the grenade attack in China having 6 relevant related links. The opening paragraph on this story also immediately outlines in a short sentence however in my opinion this article is too long at over 800 words.

The Daily Mirrors site(www.mirror.co.uk)  couldn’t be any different than the Guardians with a lot of images used to show the reader instantly what the story is about. I was surprised to find no mention of the grenade attack in China on the homepage so decided to read a random story about an FBI sting that recovered the little girl from her father who had abducted her. This was a short piece that instantly outlined the story in a concise inverted pyramid. Again this couldn’t be any different than the Guardian however I feel that both have got it wrong in some aspects particularly length. The Mirror’s story was too short and the Guardians was too long.

External Links

On most of the sites I have visited in relation to the subject of online journalism the lack of external links is a worrying trend. The only site so far that has exceeded my expectations in relation to this is www.drudgereport.com The fact that most of the news organization’s sites don’t externally link is a feature that must be reduced in the future to fully realise the potential of the internet in relation to journalistic practices.

 

Most of them just have internal navigational links that includes sections, blogs etc. They fear losing the reader however they could counteract this by opening the link in a new tab or window while keeping their site running. To retain a certain degree of journalistic credibility they must start to externally link a lot more in the future.

American Elections

Reading through some of the blogs that are related to the American election is like navigating a political minefield with different opinions coming at you from every angle. Be they Republican or Democrat. While most of them are pugwash there are a few expections with the most notable in my opinion being www.huffingtonpost.com and www.drudgereport.com

Handily enough on the homepage of the Huffington Post they have  a John Mc Cain and Barack Obama section with all posts with these tags included. On the right hand side on both of these pages is a section which links to the most popular Mc Cain or Obama stories. As a journalism student I really appreciate this as it allows one to read into and research many aspects of their campaigns. There are also a lot of videos on the site which help to give the readers a wider picture of the issues being discussed.

The home page on the Drudge Report is a lot harder to navigate with long reams of text which leaves the reader with a lot of navigating to do just to find a story they want to read however the thing about the Drudge Report is that it is a site that is essentially an external link site and I think they should be applauded for this as it is a rare quality and gives the users more options in terms of story content.