Toilet Paper is Now Being Used as Currency at an Australian Cafe
Headline
The headline works great for online delivery. It phrases the fact with 12 words and appears to be interesting and funny, which could draw viewers’ eyes. Under the circumstance that people are panic-buying toilet paper, viewers could easily understand what this news is about.
However, for the viewers who do not get the point, this headline does not work well, because viewers simply cannot get it. The subheadline supplementing the situation only appears after clicking into the news, which is not effective enough for viewers to understand the situation immediately.
Embedded links
The article embeds several links to help viewers understand the whole picture. 3 links go to other articles of VICE, 2 go to external news websites as references. As a digital born news site, it could have links to multiple media forms such as videos or pictures and social media like tweets to make the article more appealing to viewers.
Functionality
The article is too long for a digital born news site. Meanwhile, the news puts its frame on a ironic situation, but it is written mainly like a piece of hard news with lots of quotes. It could be improved by using a not quite serious tone and using some images or social media reactions.
In your post you use some of the techniques of good online writing, including a post title or headline with keywords to enhance SEO (good choice to use the one VICE used, and you should mention SEO in your analysis of the headline – are there other keywords that would improve search results?) Shorter paragraphs and subheadings make the post scannable and easier to read. You use bold text for your subheadings – in future posts, use heading tags to make them more SEO-friendly (found at the top left of the visual post editor, in a drop-down menu from ‘Paragraph’). You should also assign relevant keyword tags to your post.
You could use images as illustrations of the points you are making and as visual devices to break up text. In your future posts, ensure every image is captioned and attribution is given to the copyright holder or creator of the image.
Why do you think the article is too long for a digital-born news site? Establish reasons for your points and provide examples for the improvements you suggest.
Under functionality you seem to be commenting on the content of the article rather than the functions on the page and how they operate for users.