BET Op Ed Article Treatment

Project Overview

At the time BET was using a mixed staff of onsite content writers and freelancers as well as offsite contributors. At times some of the content generated would be controversial but the treatment for all articles was the same giving the impression that the opinion of the author was the same as that of the BET brand. Our directive was to create a treatment that separated the opinion of the author from that of BET. We did that by giving op-ed articles a tag treatment, moving the author closer to the page's title, and including a legal disclaimer to give Op-Ed articles a different distinction from our typical articles.

Project Snapshot

Date

Feb 2017

Team Members

1 Art Director

Brainstorming/Requirements Gathering Session

We spent time capturing requirements from stakeholders and analyzing the current layouts before we did another redesign. We ended up coming to the following conclusions:

Authors are placed at the bottom of articles as opposed to the top which is standard practice. This made it appear that BET was too attached to controversial articles.
There is no visual treatment for Op-Ed articles making them appear like any standard article.
There is no disclaimer associated with opinion pieces that make it clear that the opinion is that of the author and not of BET.

Original Op Ed Treatment

Competitive Research

Our intern spent time researching different Op-Ed treatments from different digital publications so we could get a sense of what Op-Ed best practices were being used.

After the analysis we were able to determine the following:

News sites tend to have separate Op-Ed sections
⁃ Some sites even have sub-sections of specific Op-Ed content
Op-Ed websites tend to use a combination of an Op-Ed or Opinion tag and/or add Op-Ed to the title of articles.
These websites also tend to have author directories and author profiles

Some Examples of Our Research

The Los Angeles Times

The LA times not only has an Op Ed section, but they also have sub-sections of grouped Op Ed content, such as the “Top of the Ticket” politically themed Op Ed section.
The LA Times adds Op-Ed to their article titles to help differentiate Op Eds from their other articles.
The LA Times seems to have several cartoon themed articles, to help drive the sense of satire.

NY Times

The NYT’s site is not completely responsive

The NYT has a specific “Opinion Pages” section of their site along with an associated “Editorial” tag.

The NYT seems to de-emphasize authors for editorial content and uses an “Editorial Board”, instead.

The Huffington Post

Similar to the LA Times, the Huffington Post, Huff Po, has an Op Ed section, and Op Ed Sub-Sections
Unlike other sites that I have evaluated, Huff Po, does not seem to strongly differentiate the concept of Op Ed from their other content. This could be due to them being founded more so as an opinion site.
Huff Po is one of the sites that I have noticed has author profile pages, which makes me believe that they brand authors and their articles/writing style.