China Daily: Drought in Europe hits crops, power output

Drought in Europe hits crops, power output

Heading and Subheading:

This news article is from the headline of the European news column of China Daily. In the heading of the article, “Drought” can hook readers as a relatively sensitive word because it concerns a serious impact on agriculture, economies, and the environment. Perhaps it would be better to add numbers to the headline to show the extent of the damage caused by the drought.

But this news doesn’t indicate subheadings. There are about 500 words in the article, which makes it a fairly lengthy news story. When a large amount of text comes into sight, it is easy for readers to miss the point, it would be better to add one or two subheadings.

News content:

The news lacks brevity, and there is room for improvement in breaking up the paragraphs, the longest paragraph is even over five lines so they look hard to read and readers would skip them. My advice is to break long paragraphs down into shorter ones.

I agree with the author citing the predictive information experts said at the end of the article, which can more effectively attract the attention of ordinary readers because changes in food prices are closely related to people’s lives. If possible, it would be more persuasive to embed a link to access some relative evidence or analysis.

Hypertextuality

There isn’t any hyperlink used in the whole text, I think some data or sources mentioned in this article should be added links, like “the drought has led 300,000 of the nation’s farms to report negative impacts”, “France recently experiencing 32 consecutive rainless days”, “In a study released in January”, etc.

Multimedia

There is only one photo of cracked earth on the exposed bed of a river shown in the article, it is hard to make audiences feel a strong visual impact. So I suggest showing several pictures of drought-affected crops and farms or adding a video to help the audience feel the drought’s effects more intuitively and visually.

Interactivity

The news story lacks interactivity with readers, it could be improved by adding a comment section below the news story so readers can interact with the journalist and other audiences. Though this article marked the detailed name of the author, it is not accessible, it can be helpful to incorporate a hyperlink accessible to an introduction of the author to increase transparency.