Interactive Google Map

Getting clicks

What makes you click on a news story while you’re scrolling through your feeds in the morning? Is it the head line? Maybe it was the picture that was posted along with the link to their site. Now that you’re on this news organization’s site, they want to keep you there and get you reading other stories. How do they do this? By using what's called clickbait.

Clickbait are those intriguingly snazzy headlines and captivating images that make you click on the story and read it. New organizations are always trying to spike your interest, such as CBC's headline and picture regarding Trudeau meeting with Trump.

Another important thing to take into account is the site itself. If you click on a link and the page is stuffed with ads, takes a long time to load or is hard to navigate around, people are going to be interested in reading the story, even if they were interested before.

Online news organizations aren’t the only ones who need to pay attention to layout, newspapers have to as well.

Today, newspapers are fighting to stay a float, which means they’re making more space to sell for ads. This means there are less stories in the paper. You may have noticed while you’re flipped through the paper. There will be two stories a on one page and the next two pages are filled with ads and maybe a few small articles. But, their layout is still pleasing to the eye and isn’t hard to navigate through. You see it as soon as you see the papers top story, it tells you to flip to page A 4 and look under and particular headline.

Online Journalism and You

There are many forms of online journalism available to people. People can now get their news on social media rather than in a newspaper.

Times have changed, most people don’t have the time to sit down and watch the news. People want to be able to get their information at their convenience, and for some, that means scrolling through Twitter while scarfing down breakfast because they don’t have time to read the paper.

Social medias, like Twitter, also play a role in online journalism. By using social media news organizations can tweet and post about their tops stories and the stories will appear in their followers’ feeds as they scroll through their social media profiles. These posts are meant to get your attention and get you to read the story, but if not, you will at least know the gist about what happened in 140 characters or less.

Due to online journalism, people can get news anytime they want no more waiting for the next paper of the next episode of the evening news. You can just scroll through Twitter or Facebook to get your fill of information. It’s also easier to find out what is going on in other parts of the world because of online journalism. With a few clicks, you can find articles from other countries and be more informed about the world around you.

Online journalism also has its downsides. Because of online journalism newspapers are becoming a rare variety of news. Why pay for a paper when you can go on a news site for free? It’s that very reason that some papers like The Independent only operate online now. TV news organizations have followed and have created websites with their broadcasts posted so you can see them at any time.