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RTE NEWS online / headings why?

  • 18-10-2020 9:44am
    #1
    Hamsterchops
    Registered Users Posts: 3,133 ✭✭✭


    So go onto RTE News online and click news, then scroll down through all the stories and you'll notice different headings appearing on top of each story.

    Examples might include 'Regional', UK, Coronavirus, Ulster, Munster, Courts, Politics, etc etc ...

    What purpose do these headings serve?

    The seems to be no rhyme nor reason, no consistency and no logical purpose that I can find for the headings, like why have a story from Belfast with a 'Regional' heading, followed by another NI story with a 'Courts' heading, followed by an article with 'Coronavirus' which may or may not be in this jurisdiction?

    I mean, is there an index somewhere where you can cross-reference all the headings? Like there seems to be so many crossovers and overlaps between the headings as to make them useless.

    Can anyone explain their purpose?


Comments

  • #2
    jmcc
    Registered Users Posts: 7,285 ✭✭✭jmcc


    Looks like a content aggregator site with feeds from various other news content providers. I thought that one of the those services was using a content generator program based on how it reported the Trump townhall interview (got the interviewer's name glaringly wrong). Information Architecture is a very easy thing to get wrong with a site. One of the worst examples was the old Irish Independent site. It had no historical depth or proper design. The new version seems to have fixed a lot of the problems and it implemented a paywall.

    RTE's reliance on news feed content is typical where there's not enough locally generated content on international/foreign topics. In some respects, it is replicating the "news" model with local content and voiced-over reports from other services. There's a link to the feed provider beneath most articles that shows the latest content from that provider. (This is from the AFP source: https://www.rte.ie/source/828564-afp// )

    Getting content from feeds to fit into the relevant categories/headers is difficult if editorial control gets overwhelmed and the feed process is heavily automated(ish) and keyword based.

    Regards...jmcc


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