The Final Analysis

Journalism 620 – Online Publishing

Professor: Theresa Collington

July, 2012

Bringing It All Together

Theresa Collington, journalism professor for National University, in her class Online Publishing (JRN 620), taught students the importance of thinking about what, how, why and how a journalist posts information in an online environment. The class was centered around weekly chats, three books, four quizzes and weekly writings used to show understanding of the material presented.

The first book studied was Steve Krug’s, Don’t Make Me Think. Krug simply instructed the reader to present content in such a way that it is intuitive and not a lot of thought should have to go into navigating the site.  In Jane Clifford Mickler's review of the book she writes "As he points out, part of the problem is with the people who create the sites. They are design experts and want their sites to be oh-so sophisticated to stand out from the zillions of other sites. Krug writes that they design “for” themselves." Though the site may be beautiful to look at and design worthy of several prizes, if it is not usable for the general public, then all the design savvy goes out the window. Mark Taylor's observations follow Jane's in that "Steve Krug, an advocate for concision and brevity, provides readers with an analysis that details just how much of a disservice websites are to the average Internet surfer." Tameeko Mullen's final comment in her analysis of the book was, "The reader does not have to do much thinking while reading this guide but at the same time is able to retain good advice on how to make their website as usable as possible without feeling like they just stepped out of a mind spinning class for developers learning how to code"

The next book required only one chapter of reading and that was Aim for the Heart by Al Tompkins where students dived into the type of material that should be included in these easily navigable pages. As the title of the book suggests, Tompkins believes heavily in online storytelling and the way you tell the story is drastically different then you would tell it in print or broadcast. Kirby Harrison succinctly summarized the required chapter's reading by saying, "A big part of attracting the readers to our articles are the headlines and the promise we make to our audience. Al Tomkins pointed this out using the main motivator to attract the audience, Money, Family, Safety, Health and Community. Using one or more of these motivators should attract a greater audience. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another great way to attract your audience." In Michael Simpson's review he shared this cocept well by saying, "Stories that pull at the heartstrings will not only be remembered but retold to co-workers, friends, or families. Then you’ve not only affected those who were there for the original story, but so many more as well." Nebo Uyanwah  also had an outstanding take on the concept of the book when she said, "The book doesn’t make me think of me being the writer it makes me think of me being the audience reading what I will be writing. I hope that made sense. Now when I will write I won’t write coming from my own point of view. I will write thinking I’m the audience with my perspective already known and given in the material." The perfect example of an online storyteller is to give the audience what they want and answer their questions even before they can formulate in their minds.

The final book required for the class was a lengthy, colorful read called, Linked: The New Science of Networks. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's meaty 280 page tome breaks down to everything is connected to everything else and everything we do has a part in this universal play. Jerry McCormick said of Linked that " I love a book that opens your eyes to a new world. I’ve been going through the world and I had some idea that we are all connected in some way some how, but this book clarifies the connection.: The first half of the book laid a strong background for making coming to this conclusion with many scientific and mathematical experiments and resulting research cited and he concluded by taking this information into the practical world. Mark Godi's intro to his blog on the book is humorous as he says, "I wanted so bad the formula for sure network success when I finished reading Linked. I was disappointed." Sylvia Mendoza's response to the second half of the book was well put as she states, "However, Barabasi’s elaborate explanations showing the complexities of how a body’s cellular makeup and the World Wide Web are similar and depend on interior networks, links and nodes, became tedious and lost parallelism." To round out the discussion on the book, Hassan Alassaly's input was quite perceptive as he writes, "Albert’s best description line in chapter 14th “where we go from here? The answer is simple. We must remove the wrapping. The goal before us is to understand complexity. To achieve on the dynamics that take place along the links. Networks are only making our world hum. To describe society, we must dress the links of the social network with actual dynamical interactions between people. To understand life we must start looking at the reaction dynamics along the links of metabolic network. To understand the internet, we must add traffic to its entangled links. To understand the disappearance of some species in an ecosystem, we have to acknowledge that some preys are easier to catch than others are. To protect the things that become necessity for our daily life and we survive on it."

Linked while an excellent book could have been a class all its own to really understand the meat of the material contained therein. Don't Make Me Think was an awakening into the art of the simple and leave the complicated to other areas of life. But none of this matters if one is not able to tell a story online in a way that a consumer will digest and understand the meaning of the message as poignantly discussed in Aim for the Heart.