Online Content

Salon.com, similar to slate.com, which I wrote about in my last post, is "An independent online magazine, featuring lively original reporting and commentary on news, politics, culture, and life." This journalistic Website has a lot of content, broken up into several categories, including arts and entertainment, books, comics, community, life, movies, news and politics, opinions, sports, and technology and business. The site also includes a daily blog, weekly columns, special coverage of the 2008 presidential election, and a podcast. I found this to be a great site, content wise. There is something to interest everyone and in this way the Website really does resemble a magazine. In addition, the site covers topics that readers might not be able to read about in a newspaper, such as an article about parking titled "We Paved Paradise-So why can't we find any place to park? Because parking is one of the biggest boondoggles -- and environmental disasters -- in our country." I thought that having a little bit of everything was a real strength for this site, as opposed to focusing on just, say, arts and entertainment. This way the site seems more rounded and will probably appeal to a larger audience.

The writing on Salon.com doesn't really differ from that of a print column. The stories range in length from one to four pages. I found this strange because online readers usually just skim an article and are turned off from longer articles spread over multiple pages. In addition, the stories generally follow the pyramid format, as opposed to the inverted pyramid. This means that readers have to actually read most of the article to get to the point, instead of having the option to stop after a few paragraphs and still know what the story is about. I found this to be similar to in depth magazine coverage, rather than what is usually expected from online journalism writing. Even though I dislike reading an article on a computer screen, I still found the articles on this site very interesting. However, I still found myself skimming over some paragraphs to find the main point. I saw this as both a strength and a weakness for the Website. On the one hand the articles are very interesting and well written. However, articles that span for four pages won't really hold an online reader's attention.

Links are used very effectively on salon.com. For example, an article titled "Here's Looking At You, 'Kid'" by Andrew O'Hehir about a documentary titled "My Kid Could Paint That" uses several links. The article is about a 4-year-old painter who might be a hoax. The article offers links to the film's official Website, a podcast of the author interviewing the film's director, the Website to view the 4-year-old's paintings, an article in the New York Times, and an article about the Sundance Film Festival, among others. These links made the article extremely different from a story in a print medium. The links allow the reader to further explore the subject of the article and learn more, if they so choose. Salon makes use of links in all of its stories and by doing so clearly lets the reader know that what they are reading is a article online complete with the use of digital multimedia.