Web Stories: The Best Format to Write News Articles

Web Stories: The Best Format to Write News Articles
As Web Stories (AMP Stories) manifest to be the need of the hour, up your game by broadcasting news in the state-of-the-art Web Story format.
Ishwari Pamu
Last Updated: Sep 7, 2020
Google picked a page from Snapchat’s playbook in order to modernize the way news is delivered on mobiles. Building further on the technical infrastructure of AMP, Google introduced Web Stories in collaboration with select publishers like CNN, Mashable, Vox, Washington Post, Wired, et al. Conceptually, Google’s Web Story format is akin to Snapchat’s Stories which allows users to stitch together images, videos and text into a fast-loading and tappable sequence of slides.
It doesn’t take long for the latest news to be past its prime. News should ably reach your audience before it’s old, its content should be engaging and worth sharing. A story, when told properly allows you to effectively reach an audience. Be it news, media content or advertising your product/service, the Story format lets you give your news an interesting arc, while providing all the hard information that you need to sell your point. It helps you give the much required twist to your content. It does what the traditional news articles can’t – depend on rich visual media along with bite-sized chunks of explanatory content to engage the readers.
Why Web Stories?
AMP Stories
With radically decreasing attention spans and the increasing time constraints, readers rarely have enough time to read lengthy news articles. Web Stories (AMP Stories) are complete and stand-alone snippets of information capable of delivering news to the mobile users without requiring them to link out. Being shareable across multiple social media platforms, they have an extraordinary potential to make strides in how publishers create and deliver mobile content.
Mobile-Focused
mobile focused
Recent developments suggest that a significant amount of people bank on mobile devices for information. Web Stories, a clever piece of engineering, are specifically designed to be mobile friendly and to provide mobile users an enhanced user experience. They are built to address the requirements of a mobile reader like news on the go, that’s easily navigable and full-screen. It’s much more worthwhile for the readers if they are able to tap through the slides of a Story rather than scroll down a lengthy page of text.
Fast-Loading
fast loading
This neat Google-led initiative is capable of putting a serious dent in the page loading time standards, particularly on mobile devices. In spite of being well stocked with images and videos, Web Stories load at a lightning fast pace. They support optimized loading and caching of high-resolution portrait-oriented images and videos which result in efficient and speedy delivery of news. This will allow your News Stories to reach your readers quicker than other traditional news articles.
Search Engine Friendly
search engine
Web Stories are search engine friendly, meaning, users will receive swipeable Web Stories as search results instead of traditional news articles. Google particularly places Story-based search results at the top of the SERPs thus providing them with a chance of being discovered by new audiences. Once Google starts doubling down on Web Stories, it will greatly impact the publishing landscape. This could alter the way news is created, delivered and read in the future.
With AI being increasingly and innovatively used in search engine algorithms, user engagement metrics like Time-On-Site and Bounce Rate are crucial ranking factors. Web Stories, being visually vibrant and swift loading, play a pivotal role in improving the user engagement metrics of your website. As Web Stories are a perfect blend of the latest technologies and enhanced UX, this format has got the technical SEO covered for you.
In this fiercely competitive world, it is of utmost importance that one stays ahead of the curve. Be a front runner in your industry, revamp your game and adopt Web Stories as a new way to write news articles. With Web Stories on the web, a tectonic shift in the digital news publishing world is imminent.
Visual Stories provides you with a one-of-a-kind Web Story Builder, a professional tool that’s available on the open web. With its flexible design, it lets your news content take the center stage. A supplementary highlight of the Web Story Builder is that you get to create your own personal library of images. It also provides you with an image cropping feature that lets you crop the uploaded images into various sizes. This user-friendly tool makes creating Web Stories a piece of cake!