Why Writing for in a Mobile-Friendly Layout is Important in Civic Reporting

For my upcoming story on the Ithaca Area Economic Development initiative with Tompkins County Bank, I’m going to be creating a visual aid to go along with my story. It is really important for me to focus on creating my stories with a mobile-friendly layout in mind. I am still continuing my reading of Mobile and Social Media Journalism by Anthony Adornato, and am learning how I can create reports that are specialized for a mobile layout. The Author Adornato explains, in chapter six, that these mobile-friendly layouts are designed to catch and hold the reader’s attention. There are many ways to catch and hold our audience’s attention. One of them is to write our stories into readable “snack-sized” chunks. To do this, we as journalists need to stray away from long streams of text and create a visually compelling story. According to Adornato, readers often scan online articles before reading. This is why it’s important to make our articles not look too wordy and to create something interesting for our audiences to glance at, to reel them into our story. For my upcoming news story about the Ithaca Economic Development initiative, I will be creating visuals to show how funds will be allocated to the Ithaca community as well as create other visual aids to aid my storytelling. While writing with mobile readers in mind, we have to prioritize the information that we are writing first. This is because when a reader comes to read our article, they need to be interested in the most compelling information first, then include some of the finer details further in the article. One important thing to keep in mind when writing for a mobile audience is to create a compelling headline. To draw our readers in, we want them to be interested in our articles. Headlines grab our reader’s attention and the better the headline is, the more we intrigue our audience and create more shareability for the articles we produce. 

Given the points above and the media landscape of the state of journalism, Adapting to mobile readers has become exponentially important to journalism. Most young readers of news today now gather their news from social media, and to get them to read our articles we need to pull them in. I’m excited to create more visually compelling stories in civic reporting to draw my audience in and create an interest in understanding civic reporting. I look forward to updating my blog in a few weeks to update more about my beat.