What you can online, you can’t do off - Blogging Issues Part 2

There are several differences in designing for content online, in blogs and in print form. I will be comparing two different mediums, a newspaper, The Star and Kotaku.com, an online news blog about video games.

Screenshot of Kotaku, an established news site on the gaming industry.

Source: www.kotaku.com

The Star Newspaper, an English Daily in Malaysia.
Source: http://www.jeffooi.com/Frontpage_Star_060802web.jpg

For print design, much information has to omitted from the content as space is limited on a newspaper and also much more costly than hosting it online. Walsh (2006, p.25) states that readers use information that is already in their memories to fill in gaps in texts. In order to attract the reader’s attention, a newspaper can add images and photographs but that is only as far is can go, and other forms of media such as audio and visual cannot be added to complement the message.

On a website or blog, multi-modal texts are more effective as more modes of communicating a message can exist. Walsh (2006, p.24) says that these modes are synchronized to create a more engaging and effective message for the reader. In the website Kotaku, apart from images and text, multimedia such as videos and audio clips can be added to offer a richer and more comprehensive experience to the reader.

The web has also become a place for new forms of media to take form. An example would be the boom of the sharing of user-created content. Websites such as YouTube have put powerful tools of video sharing into the hands of many users online and this has created a robust community in which a healthy exchange of videos can occur.

This new form of media is radically different from past offerings. Before, if you wanted entertainment you would have to switch on the TV and receive offerings from large production companies like NBC. Now, alternative media has emerged and you can easily find amateur videos on YouTube who’s quality and entertainment value may rival Hollywood companies.

References

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.