Terracotta warriors are national treasures for Chinese people, and they are also precious heritages of human civilization. They will come to Sydney this December, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally announced this week. ABC and SBS have the story on their websites.
ABC: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/14/3038261.htm?section=entertainment
SBS: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1382312/Terracotta-Warriors-coming-to-Sydney
As a piece of online news, SBS does technically better than ABC. It adopts new format of link – using key words instead of string of digits in producing the last layer of the link. This adoption may bring it advantages in competing with its counterparts in search engines such as Google and Bing. Key-word-made links are more likely and quicker to be found by the engines, and usually listed high among the results. According to the statistics, readers are used to clicking the first five results on the page.
In stories about art and design, pictures are essential supplements for textual description; visual attraction could make up the tedium which abstract words has made. In this case, ABC’s picture-choice is much better than the SBS’s. ABC unfolds the story with a picture of Terracotta on the right top of the text. For the Australian readers, it is a big lure for them to get the story behind the splendid exotic picture. SBS choose to take a picture of two directors of the arts series in front of a poster of Terracotta. It is far less attractive than the ABC one, and provides no extra information. For the readers, it doesn’t mean anything.
Another better-done factor in ABC’s story is its clear structure. It begins with a brief intro of the arts series, which may start from this December, staring the first Terracotta show, accompanied with some background knowledge. Than spare some space for the following shows. This story keeps a nice balance between main ideas and extra information, yet the SBS one does not.
P.S. I really appreciate the comments part on ABC’s story, hope that SBS will adopt one soon.
I agree! Visuals should complement well with the text. Those with less relevance and attractiveness are simply not as luring to online readers.
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