A guide for writing a guide to the content on a news site
Newspapers don’t come with a manual. They never have. They’re simple, right? Maybe, but this “no need to explain” thing is turning into a problem online, and, sometimes in print.
Without a voice from the newspaper giving advice to the reader on how to use the newspaper, each reader gets to figure it out on their own. While it may have been a good thing that every reader gets to figure out how the newspaper fit in their life, these days, more people are deciding newspapers don’t.
So this is a guide about what information might go into a guide to a newspaper-dot-com site.
Here are some questions the guide would answer
- What articles appear every Monday? Tuesday? Every Wednesday?
- What kind of content is exclusive to your site, and where do I go to find it?
- What do you (the people behind the site) like most about your site’s content? What do you like in particular? Why?
- What blogs have the highest frequency of posts? What blogs are the “most useful”? Do you categorize your blogs? Do you recommend any non-newspaper blogs?
- Your columnists — how did they get their jobs? What’s their background? Why should I care?
Got any ideas for other questions?
April 29th, 2007 at 10:27 am
[…] Write a guide to your content — online and off. Your readers don’t know and understand your product the same way you do: that’s a gap. A guide helps bridge that gap. […]