Improvement suggestion about news “School building collapse in Nigeria kills at least 9, scores trapped”

The news I chose is about Nigerian school collapses which published at China Daily on 14 March 2019. It is a brief news and have very clear point. However, compare with the same news story published at ABC news, it still has some space for improvement.

 

Lack of image

First, the news story lack of image. The whole story only used one picture of the injured boy at the beginning of the news. I think it is better to add more picture about the accident to give people more visual and detailed information.

(Screenshot 1 form China Daily)

 

Compare to the news post on ABC news, the ABC news use more than 5 image and all the pictures is about the scene of the accident.

(Screenshot 2 form ABC News)

 

I think it would elicit emotion and reaction of the reader by adding an image under the weeping father, and add some pictures of the accident scene about how the rescue operation is going and what kind of damage the accident caused.

(Screenshot 3 form China Daily)

 

Lack of hyperlinks

There are no hyperlinks of the whole story. At the end of this news, it mentioned this kind of accident often occurred in Lagos but there is no evidence to support it. It will be more reliable and relevant to add some links about the building collapses news happened in Lagos before.

(Screenshot 4 form China Daily)

 

No key points

The news story from China Daily has no key point, no highlight. The whole story is single format and only use some blank space to separate paragraph.

The news story published at ABC news has clear key points and a list of related story which gives the reader a better reading experience.

(Screenshot 5 form ABC News)

 

No comment area

There is no comment area at the bottom of the news story. The share link to social media website is only at the top of the news story. And I notice that Instagram as one of the most popular social media platform does not included. I think add the comment area at the end of the story will help more people to engage and show their opinion.

 

 

About Stephanie Huo 5 Articles
Current student studying at USYD, major in Media Practice. Contact me: Twitter_StephanieHuo

1 Comment

  1. Great observations Stephanie. China Daily does not include links to relevant background information outside the country, which is a pity for readers’ education on world affairs. I agree some information about the problems with the Nigerian building industry would give context to this event. More images would also be very useful. Instagram is not available in most of China. I should note that for assignment 1 you need to compare one legacy media site and one digital born or participatory site. ABC is also a legacy media site. Please look at the revised list of digital born and participatory sites posted in week 2.

    To improve your online delivery for Assignment 1, you need to give your feature image a title, a caption with copyright details and alt text label. You can also make your images larger to nearly fill the column. Finally please make sure you fill in your blog profile biographical details and upload an image of yourself to elicit trust from your readers.

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