1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

128 Journalism Online
mention your primary target audience in your lead or
introduction;
link to the site’s home page early in the piece; and
be explicit at the start of your piece about the area it will
cover.
You must also grab the attention of the users – it is dangerous to
stereotype web usage, but it is now accepted that a significant
number of people scan web pages rather than read them in detail.
However, there is still too often a perception gap between the
providers and recipients of web content. As usability expert Steve
Krug (2000) puts it, ‘We’re thinking “great literature” (or at least
“product brochure”) while the user’s reality is much closer to
“billboard going by at 60 miles an hour”.’
Krug accepts that he is offering a simplistic view to make a
fundamental point. He also points out that documents such as
news stories or reports may hold the reader’s attention for longer.
However, he says, most people scan in a hurry, looking for words
or phrases to catch their eye.
Krug’s focus is on the design of sites. Design is an integral part
of how you communicate, and we will come to in Chapter 7. For
now, we will concentrate on the content. Can we write our stories
in a way that will at least make the speeding motorist slow down
and take a look?
Writing for online
Jakob Nielsen (1999) offers three rules for writing on the Web:
be succinct – use no more than 50% of the text you would have
written for the same story in print;
write for scannability – use short paragraphs, subheadings and
bulleted lists instead of long blocks of text; and
use hypertext to split up long blocks of information into
multiple pages.
Nielsen is also an advocate of plain language and pyramid
structures.