Missed Opportunities

After spending this week discussing writing for the web, I felt compelled to write about a short story that jumped out at me while I was browsing Online Athens. The article is surprisingly short, the kind of info blurb that newspaper readers would absorb in a handful of seconds before moving on to something else. Normally, I'd pick something longer, but the Athens Banner-Herald article "Hearing delayed for pro-pot student club" represents one of the biggest failings of online newspapers--a missed opportunity.

Instead of capitalizing on the web format, this article seems to have been written, posted, and forgotten. The story may be familiar to plenty of Athenians, but I was clueless about the UGA chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and their upcoming (and now postponed) hearing. In a newspaper, I could forgive the brevity and focus of the story--the target audience would obviously be people following the case who had read the Banner-Herald's previous coverage. But that just doesn't cut it on the web.

Even in a story this short, there are ways for the writer to give us more information. I was instantly curious about the incident, and the first thing I did was look around for a link to more information. There wasn't one. Why not include links within the text to stories like this one, giving more details about the student group? That would be the absolute minimum in adding context to the article--a longer story, relaying all the pertinent information on that very page, would be even better. Online Athens simply sports a weak design; why doesn't it make use of categories or tags to display related stories or make it easier to find stories on the same topic? Each article appears to be copied wholesale from a newspaper, and the lack of links within the text, as well as the scarcity of images, shows that the Athens Banner-Herald could do much more to court web readers.