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Subject:Re: Writing for the web From:"Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 23 Jan 2003 20:33:59 -0800 (PST)
Dave Carpenter wrote:
> A non-writer friend was asking me about writing web
> page content vs. paper docs...Would enjoy to hear
> experience and examples of your web vs. other media
> writing.
I guess it depends on what kind of web site you are writing for.
My stuff tends to get dumped into an obscure corner of a
corporate intranet. In this case there really isn't a mass
market, so it's all about the content.
On the public Internet, a lot of sites are just regular
journalism that's been repurposed. If you want to look at pure
web writing, just look at an all-web publication like salon.com
or slate.com. Or look at a blog-style site like slashdot.org.
I assume the big commercial sits have scripts and armies of html
wranglers to handle the repurposing, and most of the
web-specific features you see online. I mean, I don't think
George F. Will is debugging his own anchor links.
I go to nytimes.com all the time to read a few columnists in
particular, who I have been reading since before the Web. I
can't detect that they have changed their writing style at all.
The news networks put all their content online... but like NYT,
it's just repurposed versions of the same old newsfeed. It's
either "output=website" or "output=peterjennings" .
I remember when slate.com was starting up, there was a lot of
discussion about the theory and methodology of web writing, and
how it differed from traditional journalism. Michael Kinsley
made the rounds of talk shows and radio interviews explaining it
in quite a lot of detail... I wish I could locate some of those
now.
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