Robin Good at MasterNewMedia has posted an interesting web article that outlines difference between a blog post and a professional news article. His article compares a post written by an average blogger with news articles written by professional web publishers.
Here are the seven key visual differences (my interpretation of the article with rewording the source)
1) Formatting of Content is practically non-existent in blog posts where as professional web articles utilizes spacing, bold, links, line length, text size and style to make the content reading experience as effective as possible.
2) Spelling and Grammar Mistakes are very common in blog posts but the web articles are error free.
3) Blog Images are often used to decorate the title rather than to provide immediate matching/relevance of content. Blog images are mediocre but professional web articles uses quality stock images or custom shot images that enrich the article by providing additional information(don’t you see that in this blog post?).
4) Content Spacing is properly maintained in web articles to clearly guide users to easily identify the separate sections at a glance. Blog posts are just consecutive paragraphs.
5) Legibility of blog posts is usually with the rationale of it does look good as the only driving logic. Web articles pay attention to all the relevant variables(line length, font style, type face, type size and sub title dimensions, etc) that make text more readable
6) Structure of the web articles is properly maintained to have various components like introduction, recommendations and conclusion.
7) References are very poor in blog posts. The linking strategy and relevancy of blog posts are not as web articles.
Even though Robin Good says that visually blog posts are not as professional as web articles, he agrees that content provided by the blogs are informative. Content is the king. May be this what made blogs more popular than news article web sites these days.
For more detailed information read What Differentiates Yet Another Blog Post From A Professionally Web Published Article?
Photo by zachstern via flickr