LAWSUIT: WOMEN BEAT HOMELESS MEN FOR SEX FETISH VIDEO CLIPS.
If there is a headline that more immediately screams out to the reader, read this, or the puppy gets it, I’d be shocked.
A lawsuit has been filed after a number of homeless men were spotted bloodied and bruised about town in St. Petersburg. It is a shocking story, but also deeply in tune with all of our baser National Enquirer-loving instincts. With the story on the website, we have no photos, and no video. Without overstepping decency, there are avenues for some great visual elements. Screenshots of websites, photos and/videos of plaintiffs, injured homeless men, for a start. We don’t get any of this. We get two hyperlinks, one to the website of company making the videos (with little explanation or context provided for the link on the page) and one to the company providing legal aid (why, why do we need this?).
2012 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES ‘FRIEND’ SOCIAL MEDIA. This is a cute little news piece. The ‘what politicians are doing with social media and how angle’ is still relatively fresh. But there’s no social media incorporated into the page, no Twitter visuals, no links to the Twitter pages of those mentioned. We get a haphazardly assembled photo-gallery of four unconnected photos of some of the people mentioned, but nothing else. It is a story on social media, that throws inflexible blocks of text at you.
I’m hammering the same themes, every week here. So much missed opportunity. The Miami Herald needs to realize that a website is not something that you need to have, in order to keep up and it is not something you can phone in. It is something you can use to enhance and improve your stories.