Football!

In the Sports section you can find the football banner. The Premier league is one of the most important leagues in the world, and The Telegraph has an excellent and detailed section about it, and of the England soccer team too.
This week latest news is that the Chelsea (one of the most important clubs and the actual champion of the Premier league) was beaten 3-0 by the Sunderland.
The match was played at Stamford Bridge today, and was qualified as: “the biggest defeat Chelsea have suffered since Roman Abramovich bought the club back in 2003 and changed the landscape of English football” by the Telegraphs columnist Jason Burt.



The page also offers the tables, results, fixtures, and statistics of the league. Here is the actual table of the Premier league:

And one of my favorite sections in this part is “tickets”, because here you can buy tickets for the matches at the lowest prices! Here is the link for it:

http://tickets.telegraph.co.uk/football-tickets/

Puzzles!

If you love newspapers puzzles you should hate online versions, but in the Daily Telegraph UK you can find a lot of these games!.
First you have to make a click in the section “lifestyle” and then in “games”. A whole new page will appear and then you can choose which game you want to play, there are crosswords, sudokus, word games and puzzles. But that`s not all! You can also win cash prices!

But like anything in life, this is not free. You have to join the page and pay £2.99. if you want to try first you can get seven days of free playing.
So, if you are a puzzle addict you can enjoy them in: http://puzzles.telegraph.co.uk/site/index.php

FINDING COMMON GROUND

So China finally released Aung Suu Kyi and, guess what? The telegraph has the whole thing on hot topics! Nothing spectacular, you’d think, taking in consideration the daily influx of international news that the British website boasts. The question here, though, is how is the information handled on The Telegraph?

The first article available to the reader is the actual news story – “In recent weeks, Beijing has underlined its commitment to Burma, calling it a “friendly neighbour” and warning the world not to meddle in its internal politics. Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, also received Than Shwe, the head of the ruling junta, for a state visit”, says the fourth paragraph, referring to the gradual evolution in Burman-Chinese relations. In fact, the article refers only marginally to the actual release of the activist; most lines are devoted to Chinese foreign policy. It definitely favors the reader who’s not up to date with the diplomatic debacle.

In fact, the final paragraph sums up the whole ordeal with more context – how the whole scenario fits in with Indian relations is also an important part of the news story. “Yesterday, the Indian Foreign minister, Somanahalli Mallaiah Krishna, expressed hope that the release would be the beginning of a process of reconciliation and a “more inclusive approach to political change”, that’s how the final paragraph closes, giving it a positive and somewhat lighthearted undertone.

But there’s more.

READER'S DELIGHT

Another article (“Release of Aung San Suu Kyi puts pressure on China”) is of much more analytical value, as it scans through the repercussions of the renowned political leader. The interesting part of this “related article” is how it fits right in with other news. This time, the emphasis is on the remaining imprisoned nobel winner: Liao Xaobo. “One of our Nobel Peace colleagues is imprisoned. We cannot be silent in the face of pressure from the Chinese government. Liu Xiaobo is not forgotten, we will work as diligently for his release as we have for that of our sister Aung San Suu Kyi” is the quote selected by the Telegraph that, coincidentally, also best describes the utility of this piece.

The editorial line of The Telegraph seeks to nurture context over everything, considering how “hot topics” are handled at the whim of the daily news agenda. In the end, what could be considered “stale” news is reinvigorated in an updated body, delivering not only a richer message, but also allowing new readers to join the talk.

This is, without a doubt, one of the better aspects of the Telegraph’s online portal.

HANDLING THE BIG GUNS

In our last posts it’s been made clear that the telegraph is an extremely well rounded newspaper, dealing with topics ranging from UK politics to fashion. What’s one of the bigger topics this week? The G-20 summit. The telegraph –as stated in a previous post- works with a well developed tag system. If it’s “hot”, it’ll be linked on the front page. Needless to say, this meeting of the world’s most influential nations is one of the few highlighted themes.

The G-20 summit page offers a sleek look at just about anything related to it. There’s more conventional articles, for instance, the prime minister David Cameron talking about the protectionism that characterized 1930’s economic policies. Clearly an interesting suggestion, one that we would’ve liked to see bounced up higher in the news hierarchy.

A QUESTION OF DESIGN

Looking strictly at the layout, one would think that the prime minister joking that “he's spending more time on World Cup bid than G20” (an article that, by the way, only encompasses only a couple of paragraphs) is much more important than the finance-related comment. As much as the world cup seems to drive the world (and especially brits), in times of slow economic recovery, these headlines must be aligned correctly. It’s safe to say that they’re ordered chronologically, but we think that the main page should obey strictly to the rules of journalistic relevance.

Now, the bad thing about this G-20 special is the way content is handled. Looking at the aforementioned article, we’d like to emphasize on the layout. Notice how after three –rather short- paragraphs the “related articles” block pops in? This selection of links, while extremely useful, has a downside to it. The screenshot at hand is a scaled version of the real webpage, so unless you own a 24” monitor, you’d probably think that the article ends right about there.

But it doesn’t. In fact, most of the context and numbers are delivered after the “related articles” option. So in other words, the link box is confusing the reader. The moment we read the first three paragraps, we immediately went looking for a new article, ignoring the bigger chunk of text waiting for us down below. The layout definitely doesn’t favour the broad reader.

ONLINE APPROVED?

That said, there is a good side to it. All of the G-20 articles published so far obey (to a certain extent) this three-paragraph-method, followed by the rather obnoxious block of links. Going through each piece of writing, we noticed that the most relevant information was placed within the first lines. That whole inverted pyramid scheme? Yeah, they got it down on the Telegraph and it favors the skimming online reader to boot!

It does take a while getting used to it, though.