Forget The Basics

When you think of writing its all pretty much the same. You learned to write an essay in what 5th grade maybe even earlier? As you got older you learned different styles and different formats and even all the fancy stuff to make your self sound oh so intelligent, and grasped your own sense of [...]

Make it snappy

Shares slide amid bail-out fears…
Extinct tortoise ‘can live again’…
Beard Cap Brings Out The Bear In People ?
One of these headlines is not like the others. But that’s not to say they didn’t all catch your attention.
Catching the viewer’s attention is the first and most important step in writing a good web article. A bold headline [...]

Writing Web-like

The era of the standing reporter is rapidly meeting its demise. With technological advances in video, capturing a story may be as simple a task as hitting the little red dot labeled “record”. Hilda Munoz, of The Hartford Courant, calls the standing reporter “useless” in today’s type of journalism. “I’d rather hear [...]

Writing for the web

Writing for the web is much different than writing for print. The way people consume information online is fundamentally different than the way they do for a newspaper or magazine that writing for the web has taken it’s own niche in journalism writing.

Readers don’t read stories, but rather scan them to pick [...]

Writing for the Web for dummies

Writing for World Wide Web can be a tricky thing.
Instead of having fleshed out features, lengthy pieces and by the books journalism, online journalism sports shorter articles, flashy graphics, multimedia and a style unique to it’s medium.
There is no question that the Internet is where journalism is headed, and for some, the transition is [...]

An Inside Look at Writing for the Web

Since the invention of the printing press, writing and the consumption of words has been done in a linear way. Words would be put onto paper in a particular order, and the reader would read through that piece of paper. This is true whether referring to newspapers, magazines, memos, a letter from Mom, [...]

Online Writing, Keyword: Simple

Online readers are ruthless. They want accessible information at the click of a mouse, and journalists better give it to them. It all boils down to survival of the simplest.
Accessible writing is:
concise
focused
organized
easy to read

It’s very sad for writers to admit, but elegantly delayed leads, illuminating anecdotes, and vivid descriptions turn off Web readers. Instead, [...]

Writing for the web: Concise is Nice

Journalists worry about word count.
“Will there be enough room for my story? Can I fit all the important points? How should I arrange what I’m trying to say? What if my editor cuts three or four inches? I need more space!”

Space is not an issue for online journalists. They have the opportunity to write for [...]

Writing for the Web

One of the first lessons journalism students learn is to write using the “inverted pyramid.” Writing for the web is often different from traditional print media, but one thing that remains the same is using the inverted pyramid. This is important because, as we learned last week in lecture, most online readers do not [...]

Why The Web?

Writing for the world wide web is a hit or miss type of endeavor. Either you have the ability, or you don’t. The way that people get their information these days, a good web writer can make all the difference when someone is in a hurry to find out what’s going on.
“I now [...]