Five Most Important Differences Between Print and Web Wrting

When it comes to newspapers and magazines, readers are usually looking for all of the details behind a story, like reading a book. In web writing, readers not only want details, but they want it right away.

Writing for Print

• Significant information; what is important and how.
• Descriptive details that describe and explain the story you are writing about. 
• Quotes that contribute and help piece your story together to give the reader other people's point of view.
• Impact of how it affects the readers
• Attribution; who said what in your story. Don't use unnamed sources without permission from your editor

Also, be clear in your stories. You can always have a lot of information, but don't bore the reader by clumping it all together. Spread out your information and look over what is relevant and what is not.

Writing for Web

• Priority: this changes the audience, market and publication. What is the most important information the reader should know? Think of the inverted Pyramid, only in this new version you have:

Lede

Summary (nut)

News

Context

Significance, Scope, Impact

Anchor Quote

General Attribution

Transition to whats to come

News bit

News bit, etc.

• Efficiency: write and organize material for the fastest understanding. Write for "snapshot" reading and scans. Make the text easy to scan.
• Clarity: Make understanding immediate and easy. Be literal, repetitive and specific.
• Brevity: Leave modifying or qualifying phrases to the end of sentences when possible. One main idea at a time.
• Audience: Remember who you are writing for.Why should this story matter to them? Would this particular group be interested in this story?

Follow the Leader

When I found this photograph of some students being lead to safety after the shooting, I just looked at it for a moment; just imagining "What if these children had no one to lead them to safety?" 

When I woke up in the afternoon and clicked on the television, seeing the Sandy Brooke Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut was not the first thing I wanted to digest before my breakfast. The last shooting I remembered was when  a man went into a movie theater and shot people during the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. So hearing about another man going into an elementary school and shooting almost everything in his path just blew my mind.

I had talked to my mother a few minutes after seeing the news and she being an Early Childhood Education teacher hearing about young children being shot, well it just broke her heart. One thing she had said to me though, really stuck on my mind. She said that "Little bitties, being six and seven years old don't know where to go or what to do when things like that happen. They're just scared." And then I questioned no one saying "What if these kids had no teacher to lock them in a closet or lead them to safety before the "bad man" came after them. I then thought about my little brother who had just turned seven years old. He was a smart boy and could easily tell the difference between a joke and a lie. But, God forbid if he were to be put into the same situation as the kids at Sandy Brooke, what would he do if his teacher had not been with him and his classmates? Where would they go, what would they do? What would you do if you had to protect a room full of twenty or more children who were not your own, but your responsibility between the hours of seven and two thirty? I'm not saying everyone needs to be a hero, but that you always have a choice to lead or follow. What would these kids have done if they did not have a leader?