Writing news for the Web
Written by amedeo on September 20th, 2007
When writing news for the Web, you must:
- Present information in an easily scanned format;
- Provide summaries; CNN.com does this well with Story Highlights at the top of its articles;
- Recognize that sentence-extending musicality and cognition-consuming cleverness will drive readers to other sites that more efficiently transmit what makes news valuable: new information;
- Use independently functioning information modules:
- Break an article into its components (quotes, description, analysis and more);
- Create a subsection for each component;
- Arrange subsection points in order of most important to least important (the old pyramid);
- There’s your module.
+ give links about the websites mentioned in the article.
NYT, and WSJ are good with this but other papers like the LA Times puts one link all the way at the bottom of the article. There should be a link to the SF group that started the whole thing.
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-parking20sep20,1,5078624.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
Good point, Rob. Thanks for adding it. Well-presented and informatively described links to external and internal content are key to turning a story into an information network hub. However, I did not include the concept in this post as I wanted to focus on how an article is written. Though many have written about the value of linking, I’ll broach this topic soon, as well.
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