I will be analysing the online article ‘”Breathtakingly arrogant.” George Pell’s sentencing delivered live worldwide” appearing in the digital-born publication Mammamia, posted on March 13th.
https://www.mamamia.com.au/george-pell-sentencing/
There are two pictures placed above the story. A general audience knows the photo on the right is of Cardinal George Pell, but we can only assume the photo on the left is of Chief Justice Peter Kidd. Given the digital-born publication targets a younger demographic looking for alternative/light-hearted news and opinion pieces, there is no assuming a reader will gage immediately who they are looking at in these pictures. It would serve the purpose of clarity on the page to see names.
Hyperlinks are randomly distributed in the article. They do not extend a reader’s knowledge of events outside of what the publication has released; they take a reader to other, similar articles by Mammamia. Hyperlinks are also inconsistent: some mentioning of names take a reader to other Mammamia pages about Pell’s conviction and others do not, seemingly at random.
Refer to the image at the top of the post. We can see a link to 6 Comments appears clearly on the top left hand side of the page. This encourages engagement as a reader immediately sees they can contribute to the article. Engagement is relatively high, with several people having their say.
Great suggestions Sylvie. I agree about the captioning, and the photos also need to be copyright credit, something that Mamamia should do as a matter of course, even if those images were theirs. The links are designed to drive traffic through the site – not simply to background users. They wouldn’t want to send traffic to competitor sites, which Buzzfeed is less afraid to do. What else would you have linked to? I agree the linking practice is inconsistent – some links are one word long, some many words, and the signposting isn’t consistent either. On the engagement, it’s actually quite low. Really engaging conversations can get hundreds of responses.
To improve your online delivery for Assignment 1, you need to set a feature image and give it a title, a caption with copyright details and alt text label. Embed all links and don’t spell out the URLs. Also keyword tags don’t have hashtags, and are separated by commas. Finally please make sure you fill in your blog profile biographical details and upload an image of yourself to elicit trust from your readers.
Thanks Fiona