Today is the first day of october, and after a quick lunch break, we started the course about "Online Publishing" with the journalist Chris Wheal who, for what we saw googling, is quite popular on the net. That, in fact, has been one of the first topic we talked about: how to become easily foundable on google, and on the net in general. Googling my name, for example, I've found out that my youtube channel is the first result showed, and that's pretty strange seeing that I'm not uploding since....ages. The magazine I write for was one the least results on the first google page, and this made up a lot of question in my mind about my "professional image".
Anyway, after this easy exercise, we jumped into the main differences between online and press publishing. Language, content, insights... basically, everything is related to the different reader we want to reach. Online readers prefer something clear, quick and short, while a newspaper reader search for more quality, more insights, more informations. Also the layout and the use of images have a different impact: online we, as journalist, have more opportunities, seeing that we can add videos, multimedia, podcast, photo gallery...so we can easily satisfied the "vision needing" of the reader we want to catch.
A right way of use this opportunities works also to build a kind of loyal relation with not only the usual readers, but also the "random ones". In fact, it' s very common to search on the net a news instead of a proper news website...so a good headline, a good photo, an understandable layout and a clear language can make a new reader stay on our page, and probably come back.
Another important thing we have to consider when we write for a online press, is that our page must work on different devices: nowadays people read news on their phone, tablet, laptop, dedicated app... so we have to consider very carefully the size and the structure of our page (in this case, maybe is better to leave this job to the layout designer instead of trying randomly to use html code or...whatever).
So at the end, what are the rules of Online publishing? first of all, look at other online magazines/newspaper as a "client" and trying to understand what we like or dislike about that page, and learn the lesson about. Secondly, write down our piece considering the platform we are working for, and use a right balanced language (note: people on the net usually "scan", so we don't really need to construct long and complicate phrases in queen's english). Thirdly, take advantage of the skill of internet: add links to related topic or to websites, images, videos, a comment space, icons of sharing...everything that could encorage the public to take part in our piece, because at the end, online publishing is all about interacting with our readers to a new, powerful level.
