I analyzed a story about Belgian women on strike nationwide for equality published by China Daily. This is a really poor example of online news because so many things are missing in terms of web writing.
The whole story only uses white space for breaking the paragraphs except one image about the news below the headline. To improve this, it may be helpful to insert an image of “When Women Stop. The World Stops.” above the third paragraph to highlight the theme of the march.
Secondly, it would be better to apply subtitles to the news story because this is a quite long story. For example, in the paragraph talking about those male supporters of this strike should be emphasized with a subtitle since this may be novel for the audience and may increase the news value.
Meanwhile, subtitles help to break the story clearly into paragraphs. Moreover, the editor mentioned several similar strikes in other countries like Spain and France, while there is no link of these related events.
Apart from that, in the later part of the journalism, a survey conducted by Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a report from European Commission has been quoted. In such situation, the links of them and the percentage figures of the data will serve functionally for these two paragraphs.
Last but not the least, there is no contact information about the editors and the editors did not provide audience with opportunities of interaction such as comment section, vote function etc..
Excellent observations Yang. More images would have given the story more visual interest and illustrative power, and certainly links were required to that source material. There’s also a typo in the first par: it should say womens’ empowerment. I’m not convinced that opening comments on this story would encourage participation. Would Chinese people be more willing to comment here or on Wechat or Weibo?
Your post could have had an SEO friendly headline, such as China Daily’s Belgian women’s strike coverage needs improvement. You also need to ensure that links open in new tabs, and that you set a feature image for your post. You could also try and make sure any illustrative images you add to the post are big enough to read. We will talk about image dimensions next week. Finally, all your future assignment posts need to be made public, unless they contain sensitive material. This is a justifiable and well-argued critique and so you should not fear making it public.