George Michael in the Times

Last week, Ann Powers wrote a very interesting piece on George Michael. It was the sort of story that leaves the reader, or at least left this reader, wanting more. And so, there was more, including a photo gallery with Michael's thoughts on ten of songs and daily blog posts featuring outtakes from the interviews transcript. The problem, though, is that it's horribly organized.

Essentially, if you read the feature, you can link to the photo gallery, but it doesn't link to the blog. Then, if you find one of the posts, you might be able to catch a link to the story or the photo stream or maybe one other blog post, but not all of them.

Here are all of the related blog posts I found.

June 25
June 24
June 23
June 19

I'm not sure if I found all of the outtakes. Quite frankly, it was a pain in the ass to find what I did, scrolling through days of posts that I didn't feel like reading.

It's quite odd that while mainstream media outlets are attempting to boost their online presence, they can't manage to do it right. On the sidebar of the Soundboard blog, there is a list of categories, none of which involve a series of related posts regarding on interview with one subject. It's like running a print story with a page jump that leads nowhere.

As much as print papers want to get into the blogging game, I think that perhaps some people have misunderstood the popularity of blogs. The success of the medium isn't just the frequency with which one can publish, nor is it the fact that one can write as much or as little as necessary without working around word counts. One of the major attractions of the blog is the ease with which readers can follow a story told in installments.

Let's look at Perez Hilton, for example. Today, he posted that Madonna was spotted sans wedding ring. Now, if you just stumbled on this and you didn't know about anything about the rumored split between Madonna and Guy Ritchie, you might be curious for more. So you click on the label that reads "Madonna" and it brings up all this.

I know I'm preaching to the choir when I say this, but the thing about Internet reporting is that it's typically read when people are at work. The stories need to be as easy to access as possible because you're dealing with an audience that is clicking between a Word document and your story while trying not to let the boss see. Easy navigation is key.

Think of it like the tried and true inverted pyramid. You put the who, what, when, where and why in the top paragraph to grab the reader. You follow it with the most crucial information and leave the least important information at the bottom either for editing purposes or because readers often don't follow the jump. Your main story is equivalent to the 5 Ws, the lead if you will, everything else is for those willing to read the entire story. Put it together and you have a cohesive read. Seperate the parts of the story and scatter them around the site without any correlation and you have a missed opportunity.