Online journalism today…

I just read a post on Twitter that’s linking to a diagram depicting online journalism as it was 10 years ago, and how it is today.

How online journalism looks today..

My question is this however – does its current layout dampen our enthusiasm for what we’re reading? I suggest that the content of the articles is just as stimulating, but perhaps some people find it harder to access, due to the amount of ads being placed around said article.

Furthermore, the comments box isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes, readers have pertinent things to say on a subject, especially if they have an interest in the topic being covered. Of course you get the occasional idiotic comment – but that’s what moderators are for, they can simply delete any irrelevant comments.

Finally, the recommendation box telling readers to ‘share the story’ – via Facebook, Digg etc, is, I would argue, a way of increasing awareness of a story by sharing it with those who would be most interested. Sure, it may be cluttered, but as intelligent human beings who are choosing to read the story in the first place, we’re quite capable enough of picking out the salient facts on a page.

Grammar Nazi: Potentially part one of a series…

 Just had a rather unsavoury request through from an un-named journalist who asks:

“Are you a mother with a child under five who is a smoker but who doesn’t smoke in the home?”

The journalist in question, did of course mean to ask, “Are you a mother with a child under five?  Do you smoke, but not in the home?”

One hopes, anyway.

And they say that English standards have slipped…