Blogging Long or Short
I’m changing the look of this blog a little.
I’ve noticed that most items in our aggregator are pithy little hit-and-link entries, while my wordy (“more in-depth”) attempts are there in full, both here and on my blue Other Journalism blog.
I’ll take this as an opportunity to practice what I preached to my students: “Tell the readers where they’re going. Use summaries and other navigation guides.”
The technique is standard in online journalism, using headlines and summaries on a “front” or “section” page, linked to the full length story “inside the paper.” Similarly, a list of related headline-links can go at the end or along the side of a story, the way The New York Times does it. This isn’t hard-news reporting, but from now on when a blog item gets longer than a few lines, I’ll put a short summary on that days blog page, with a headline linked to a longer “story” form, as I did with yesterday’s debugging item.
And, as another navigation experiment, when something cross-links to my blue-framed Other Journalism blog or to other things I’ve written, I’ll use a blue link. I’ll saving the default red ones for links to external sources. (I considered reserving crimson for Harvard blogs and using some other color for the rest of the universe, but decided that was getting too complicated.)
