Blog Post: Reporting the expanded travel ban

Hypertextual

Being yet another story in the ABC’s ongoing reporting of the coronavirus outbreak, this article sports countless links to their broader COVID-19 coverage. Such links are both in-text and, for the desktop version, in a sidebar, themed ‘Coronavirus Danger’.

However, all links replaced the current page and the in-text links somewhat broke up the flow of reading the story. Perhaps these in-text links could be dropped, considering they only take the reader to other ABC articles, some of which were already offered in the sidebar.

Additionally, the ‘Coronavirus Danger’ section was very long, leaving a lot of blank space at the bottom of the article. Perhaps this could be replaced by a dropdown menu, so the links at the bottom of the page aren’t missed.

Multimedia

The article features two videos, one which provides the original source material and another that gives complimentary information. This second video was a preferable alternative to having the page replaced by another article when looking for further COVID-19 news.

Interactive

Aside from the usual social share buttons, there is also a form where readers can submit questions regarding COVID-19 for the ABC to investigate. However, this form is longer than my phone screen, so once scrolled into the middle of, it is difficult to scroll out of. This seems to be because the form itself can be scrolled, so an improvement could be to make this feature static.

Original article:

• Italy added to Australia’s coronavirus travel ban alongside China, Iran, South Korea