Wednesday, October 01, 2008
The Age: getting bloggier by the day. I was just browsing The Age, shocked at the sudden descent into extreme ill-health of Rob Guest, who is of course best known as the host of zeitgeisty '90s TV dating show Man O Man, although he also acted and sang a bit. And I noticed that the paper is hyperlinking its stories like a blog does.
This might not sound particularly revolutionary (and I welcome any evidence that they've been doing this for more than a month or so), but for years and years, as far as I can remember, online newspapers pretty much just listed their stories in indices (the front page and the various other topic gateways such as Opinion and Entertainment). You clicked on the stories to read them and then went back to the index, or picked a different index, or read some 'related stories' at the bottom of the article, or went through the list of 'most read stories'. Actually providing in-text hyperlinks within individual articles to other articles on similar topics is a much more web-native thing to do, and it's something I associate with blogs.
It's a smart thing to do advertising-wise, as leveraging the long tail of the archives gets more page views and hence more CPM. It's also a concession to the ways in which online reading is less linear than hard-copy reading - previously, the 'click' almost operated like an online metaphor for the 'page turn'. However, the paper still retains its voice of authority because the hyperlink always cites itself: this is the digital equivalent of writing "as this newspaper previously reported".
This might not sound particularly revolutionary (and I welcome any evidence that they've been doing this for more than a month or so), but for years and years, as far as I can remember, online newspapers pretty much just listed their stories in indices (the front page and the various other topic gateways such as Opinion and Entertainment). You clicked on the stories to read them and then went back to the index, or picked a different index, or read some 'related stories' at the bottom of the article, or went through the list of 'most read stories'. Actually providing in-text hyperlinks within individual articles to other articles on similar topics is a much more web-native thing to do, and it's something I associate with blogs.
It's a smart thing to do advertising-wise, as leveraging the long tail of the archives gets more page views and hence more CPM. It's also a concession to the ways in which online reading is less linear than hard-copy reading - previously, the 'click' almost operated like an online metaphor for the 'page turn'. However, the paper still retains its voice of authority because the hyperlink always cites itself: this is the digital equivalent of writing "as this newspaper previously reported".
