The news story published by Ryan Broderick on Buzzfeed News can be improved in several ways to present a clearer and more readable structure.
Advertisement
The advertisements could be easily mixed up with news images as they are both placed between paragraphs and are similar in scales. This kind of layout leads to readers’ confusion and distraction from the story. Placing the advertisements aside next to the texts rather than between the texts would be a better option.
Hypertextuality
The appearance of hyperlinks in the text is slightly too frequent and some of the links are unnecessary and interrupt audiences’ reading. For example, there are three links about Lijian Zhao’s tweets and twitter account in the second paragraph. The paragraph itself is already short and clear, hence the hyperlinks would make readers hard to concentrate as people would click on each link to see what exactly the text is referring to. A better way to do it is to place only one link to Lijian Zhao’s twitter account and present his tweets by putting screenshot images of his tweets below.
Moreover, the hyperlink of “have concluded” in the third paragraph links to WHO’s updating page about coronavirus worldwide situation rather than a clear report or news that gives a conclusion of where the disease starts.
The same thing happens again with the following hyperlink “around the world”. The link leads readers to a news heading: “These Charts Show How The US Coronavirus Outbreak Compares To Those In Other Countries”, which gives very much of confusion since readers would normally expect to see a report telling data about infected people and deaths caused by coronavirus around the world rather than a comparison between the US and other countries.
Multimediality
The news only uses images to support its text. However, it uses videos to support its ads, which makes the ads having a stronger appearance than the news itself and becoming a big distraction to the audience.
SEO
Although its heading contains keywords such as coronavirus and China, it has only one hashtag: China. It would be so much better to contain hashtags such as “coronavirus”, “COVID-19” and ”Chinese government”.
Great observations about the highly distracting nature of the advertising vs the content of the story. I agree that embedding the tweets would have been preferable to linking to tweets in another tab. (Do those links open in the Twitter app on mobile?)
The large number of links does seem to be leading the user away from the original story rather than offering context or evidence in ways that keep us present.
Good suggestions too for added keywords that could enhance the SEO of the Buzzfeed story.
You use appropriate naming conventions for the features and functions of online journalism. In part 2 of your assignment add reference to Bradshaw and other readings.
In your post you use some of the techniques of good web writing, including subheadings using heading tags, a post title using keywords, and images to illustrate the points you are making and to break up text. You have embedded the link to the story, and it opens in a new tab. You do not need to use ‘assignment 1’ as a tag – you have assigned the post to the Assignment 1 category. You might have used some of the keywords identified in your headline instead.
The screenshots you use should be captioned and include attribution for the copyright holder or source of the image, even where it seems obvious.