Blogging Long, Short, or Summarized and Linked
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.)
