BLOG POST
Links Need To Be Improved:A Brief Analysis Of An Airline Crash Report Form Buzzfeed News.
by Cora Yuan
The story I prefer to analysis is the report about the Ethiopian airlines fight craft, posted by the buzzfeed news.
It is can be seen that the reporter just caught the news information through different social media platforms and this story is definitely a collection of those twitters. I think this online report is quite good but there are still something like the links which seem to be not so suitable and make reader confused.
Suitable links:
Firstly, some links are not necessary because the resources are easy to find through google or twitter, for example, there is a link to the airline twitter “ according to the airline”.
More importantly, at the end of this broken part, the writer put the full content with a directly share of that twitter. They are duplicates. I don not think they are necessary with a directly share, because reader can read the content of the twitter through the share on this site.
Then, some link is too long, like “ lion air passenger plane that crashed”, I do not think reader will like this long link and it can be change into “plane” only.
Thirdly, the writer also put some link in verbs that may make reader feel confused, such as “said” and “shared”. Maybe the writer wants to let reader go to those twitters more conveniently, but I think she can put those link under the author instead of the verb.
And what’s more, I think writer can put links to help reader understand to some unfamiliar professional words like “ Nairobic-bound”and “flight 302” to help reader get more information about this airline such as structure.
Images use:
The position of the images in this article is suitable, but many of them are share of twitters of the contents from official twitter accounts. They indeed let reader follow the attitudes from several main responsible parties.
The author uses two news photographs and adds a very brief source under the pictures. I think writer can give more information about it to let reader know what happens on the pictures.
And because this is a developing story, I think writer can put a video in the end of the article as a supplement to the previous report of this worldwide event.
Text need to be broken up:
This story is be broken into several apart by pictures and long spaces and each part only has one to two sentences, so it is easy to follow and read.
User interaction:
In this part, this website done a good job. At to top of the article ,there are links for sharing followed the title.
After the subtitle, there are another links for reader to share again.
At the bottom of this story, to encourage the interaction between reader and reporter, there is a brief introduction of this reporter and call for people to contact.
Also there are comments space for readers to post their attitude.
Functionality:
All links on this story go to the right places and real work.And Here are more reports from CNN what you need to know about the global backlash to Boeing 737 Max 8.
(Posted by Cora Yuan, 3/13/2019)
Interesting observations Cora. I think the Buzzfeed links are justified, because not everyone uses Twitter (only 14% of Australian social media users use it) and so the majority of the audience may not know how to search it for single tweets. I agree that duplication is unnecessary, but the two tweets features from Ethiopian Airlines are two different bulletins. I agree that linking verbs is not helpful – rather use relevant keywords. One of the links you have suggested is to a story published after this one, so couldn’t be included in the news you’re analysing. Finally, Buzzfeed does not have copyright permission to re-publish Guardian video, and would be unlikely to promote a competitor publication in this way. It might however link to such a video if it was produced before this news was written. You might also like to look at my comments on Rasiha and Maria’s posts about the same story.
In terms of your own writing practice, you need to be aware of not repeating material in your post. There was no need for the words blog post (that’s self-evident and you have categorised the story already), or for a second headline…or for a third byline, as there’s a link to your bio at the top of the post and it’s written in full at the bottom of the post. So be aware of the features of the blog template.
You need to properly caption any images. Who are these people in the feature image? Where are they? If the Guardian doesn’t say then that is a form of colonialism, which disregards the importance of acknowledging non-Anglo Saxon people. You could also link back to the original. I’ll teach you how to do that next week. Where is the caption, and the copyright details for the second image?