Lessons Learned

Wednesday morning, as the media scrambled to find out who our next president will be, participants in the "Writing Online News" seminar wrote about what surprised them, what they learned and what they think online journalists need to learn next.

They found that:

• Online sites are learning as they go. Even with a high-speed Internet connection, TV is still faster and more efficient at reporting breaking news. But there's a plus to being slower -- reliability. The time it takes to type information in, edit it (we hope) and publish it online, allows the chance to step back, if only for a moment, and think about what's being said.

• Serious gaps exist in writing and storytelling quality online. Stories that held a reader's interest often were the ones displaying a writer's voice, putting a reader, for example, at Hillary Clinton's victory party. We wanted the facts, but we also wanted a story.

• Many sites took advantage of the Web's technology to engage readers with deep and ever-changing information, chats and other interactive tools. For example, one chart tracked the network's calls on the Presidential election state-by-state. But while some interactive tools were useful, others seemed to serve to no purpose beyond showing off the medium's bells and whistles.

Click on the questions to the right to read their discoveries.

[National Newspapers ] [National Broadcast Outlets] [Opinion Websites ] [Web-Only Politics ] [Swing-state Broadcast Stations] [Local Newspapers] [Web-only vs. Newspaper]
[International Websites]

Question 1:
What surprised me?

Question 2:
What did I learn?

Question 3:
What do I need to learn next?