Online Delivery: getting more traffic or embracing more journalism?

Six Highly Unlikely Brexit Outcomes – One of Which Must Happen This Week

An article titled ‘Six Highly Unlikely Brexit Outcomes – One of Which Must Happen This Week’ by Gavin Haynes, a freelance journalist, appears on vice.com on 12 March 2019.

Compared with other ‘formal’ reports over Brexit happening in the UK, such as the ones by BBC and ABC, this article seems unique. After reading it through, I find that the writer is hungry for clicks on his article and has less concern over its content strategies.

Six Highly Unlikely Brexit Outcomes – One of Which Must Happen This Week
The compelling headline written by Gavin Haynes

Such an attractive headline is very likely to raise the viewers curiosity, if only it has the chance to be searched. The headline would be more optimised on search engines if the keywords, ‘Brexit Outcomes’, were put in the first positions.

As for the content, Gavin writes emotionally and without sources. In the latter part of the article, he predicts several ridiculous outcomes of Brexit with a firm tone, without any support.

A pridiction with high odds but without reasons and supports

Although these pure ‘opinions’ might satisfy some viewers who only chase for interesting sayings online, such writing makes this jounalistic article a one-way story-telling reading without any conversation. Situation would be better, if Gavin linked more sources for his pridictions.

Thus this article meets few standards of online delivery, for it not only goes against the ‘BASIC princles’, but lacks search engine optimisation.

 

 

 

 

 

About Victor Shen 5 Articles
A media and communication student who is now studying Master of Media and Practice in USYD. Used to study at the University of Nottingham. Having an interest in gender study and Japanese pop culture and subculture.

1 Comment

  1. Interesting suggestions Victor, and good use of tags. This is a listicle, a special form of online journalism feature that appears as a list, and yes, it’s a satirical opinion pieces as well. It’s not a news story because it doesn’t deal with something new and timely, but an existing issue. It’s also well over 500 words long (1,245). That’s why it doesn’t follow the principles of balance and objectivity required of news. You need to choose news stories to analyse for your assignment. I agree that the article could have practised SEO more effectively

    In terms of your web writing: you could have used a picture that wasn’t repeating your lead sentence, for example the feature image from the Vice story. It’s hard to work out what yours is as much of the text is out of frame. The link to Gavin Haynes picture was superfluous because it tells us nothing more about him. Does he have a Twitter account that would tell us more? Finally make sure that you set links to open in new tabs.

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