Thursday, March 6, 2014

Let the Web be the Web


Wednesday's edition of The Orion had a nicely packaged feature assembled by Sergio Sanchez about the seniors on Chico State's men's and women's basketball teams. In it, Sergio wrote capsule descriptions of what each player had accomplished this season followed by quotations from each (two were missing) about his or her most memorable moment accompanied by photos with player position and hometown.

This half-page of photos and text is so much more readable than the typical 15-inch slab of text about the departing seniors, so I was surprised to see the same feature on theorion.com looking like a newspaper feature story.


With a little thought and a little more work, the version that ran in the ink-and-paper edition could have been constructed. But the Web offers lots of other possibilities (think of The Daily Prophet, the newspaper with photos that move, from the Harry Potter books and movies). Source: bahtmun.tumblr.com


Or wouldn't it be fun to see and hear embedded Vine, Tout or InstaGram videos instead of photos on the newsprint version of Sergio's feature?

How about screen-wide videos or photos of each player that animate when a reader scrolls down a page? It might look something like this from Pitchfork, a British magazine.

Click to read the entire scrolling story.

I'll bet you can come up with a half-dozen other ways to present the information. Think about those the next time you're planning a story the Web.

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