The Plain-Dealer did not excel this weekend when it came to reporting on the Oscars. I don’t have a television, so I hoped that the online newspaper wouldn’t let me down. It didn’t on that aspect. I don’t know what time the awards came on, but I’m glad that the paper stuck through with its outline for where people could find information on the event. I enjoy the paper's consistency.
But coming back to the page hours later had me singing a different tune about Cleveland’s work. The format of the page turned out to be a hot mess. The information supplied during the awards was a little different now on the site. If you wanted to see all the tweets that Oscars LIVE shared, you'd have to continue scrolling down and clicking on the "Show Additional Entries" link. Do you know how many people tweeted and retweeted each minute? I'd recommend that the page consist of a permalink that moves readers to a new Twitter page. The process of reading all the tweets would still be tedious, but at least readers wouldn't have to scroll down so often. What's worse is that this live tweet event took its place smack dab in the middle of the blog that the staff posted. Imagine that you're just reading from the bottom of the blog post to the top (another thing I want to address) and bam: oh look, an ugly "Oscars LIVE" Twitter feed. That's cool. I'll just go above that to read the rest of this blog. Trust me. You'd say the same thing if you'd click on the permalink and scroll down. Don't get me started with the photo slide show put in a random area in the post. Captions would’ve helped a lot. I recognized some of the people, but others I had no idea who they were. Look: there's Adele. Now there's George Clooney. Now there's some random woman dressed in a gold dress crying on some steps. No idea who she is. Make it clear who is who, and put the photos in one place: not just one slide show and a photo gallery below it. And what is with the edited version of the Academy Awards page TPD came up with? Try reading the article from top to bottom. That's right. You can't. The staff arranged the process of the event like a Twitter feed. You'd have to read 25 percent of the article at the start, then scroll all the way down to half of the page and read up. If you want to read the comments, they're under the "Related Stories" section. I'm upset about the coverage the website provided me. It was not organized, and it just seemed like the staff threw in pictures, tweets and slide shows into a biased blog post. Thanks, Ohio.
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Meet Casby.Majoring in journalism with an entrepreneurship minor at Archives
May 2013
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