October 9th, 1940, John Lennon was born in the English city of Liverpool. 70 years later, Lennon is still a big name around the world. Beatles fans celebrate his birthday in many ways today. Here are two pieces of news on this story.
ABC world news: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/beatles-fans-celebrate-john-lennons-70th-birthday/story?id=11836351
Reuters: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/09/3033920.htm?section=entertainment
These two pieces are presented in different style though they both posted as online news. The story from ABC is unfolded in a broadcast style, while the other one is more like plain online news. The style difference reflects mostly in their word choice and structure.
The former one uses much more oral language rather than literary language which online news usually prefer. And it has looser structure than Reuters does. Take a careful look at them, you may find that the piece presented by Reuters follows strict news logic – a brief introduction embracing core information of the news, some background knowledge about the main characters followed by some quotes from them and then some detail reports of what actually happened. ABC presents the story with back-story and actual news story intersected. The merit of ABC’s style is that it makes the news more story-like and attractive. I cannot give a black-white judgment in this case, because, I think, both of them are informative and well-presented, everyone may has his/her own favored style, so the one fits better is better.
Though the contents of these two stories are equally appreciated, Reuters has a nicer layout than ABC. Because of too much additional materials and adds, ABC has to squeeze its news into some small blocks, in this case, the whole news is spilt into 4 blocks in two pages. This kind of layout may cause some loss in readers. Usually, readers don’t bother to turn to the next page to read some unnecessary information of entertainment news. Thus news, especially entertainment news, in proper length within one page is important.
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