1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Online story construction 129
Crawford Kilian 6 emphasizes the importance of ‘hooking an
impatient visitor . . . Your readers are skimming and scanning, so
use both headlines and text to grab them.’ His advice is:
make headlines simple and informative;
use quotation marks in text because people seem to prefer what
someone actually said;
include questions, as they make us seek the answer;
include unusual statements, as readers love to be surprised;
include the ‘promise of conflict – we love fights’;
use news pegs ‘to tie content to the coat-tails of some big
current event’; and
address the reader directly.
Jakob Nielsen emphasizes the value of web editors and Alysson
Troffer 7 has some useful guidelines for editing ‘non-sequential
content’ in the e-zine Contentious. As well as keeping chunks short
and self-contained, she suggests editing them in random, rather
than sequential, order. This helps to ‘ensure a suitable and
accessible organization for your readers’.
To accommodate scanning, she suggests that you:
get right to the point;
emphasize what is new or different about each chunk;
avoid the ‘as shown above’ syndrome– you should not write
your story as if all users will read all the chunks, but instead
provide links and context on each page; and
make pronoun references explicit and close – ‘Whatever “it”
refers to may have scrolled off your reader’s screen.’
Like Nielsen and Kilian, Troffer also stresses the importance of
plain language, particularly in headlines:
Your headings and page titles should explain clearly the topic
addressed on each page in terms that reflect your audience’s
6 www.contentious.com
7 www.contentious.com