Poet laureate mangled in the Times

Last month I wrote about how The Mirror messed up a new poem from the poet laureate by laying it out badly on their web site. The main point is less that poetry should be handled carefully (which it should), and more that we should be sensitive to when content requires tailored presentation, rather than shoving it in generic article templates that ruin it by, say, putting a large animated advert in the middle of it.

Well, The Mirror are at it again, with the same unfortunate author. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem about UK flights grounded because of the Icelandic volcano appears on their site with all the same mistakes as her first one, only this time missing a word to boot.* (Believe it or not, an even more horrific version appears elsewhere on the same site).

This time, however, the Times are at it too.

The Times Online layout of the poem, which is called ‘Silver Lining’, is nowhere near as bad as The Mirror. The text is not broken up, and putting the whole poem in bold with the title in bold capitals helps it to stand out a little in the column.

Yet it hardly jumps out, does it?

So much more could be done to enhance the presentation on the page, for example through indentation, font size, colour or type, or with additional graphical elements – especially as it is having to compete with two noisy side columns for the readers’ attention. Worse still, the ‘RELATED LINKS’ text box pushes the first half of the poem over to the right, playing havoc with the line breaks.

Noise and interruption

Online newspaper layouts are not suited for verse because there is far too much clamour on the page, and poetry requires close attention. Where their article templates might work for longer, undifferentiated blocks of prose, poems end up being broken up by inserted elements such as adverts and link boxes.

But surely the Times Online could have formatted the poem specifically instead of just publishing it in a default standard article template (albeit in bold)? Why not go one further and develop a dedicated poetry template, where the related links still feature without realigning the verse, or at least make a standard template more accommodating to forms other than paragraphs of text?

This is not just about poetry. The moral is that if you have more sensitive content, don’t just whack it into a standard article template that will chew it up.  Design a specific template for that content, or a layout that will work for everything you want to publish.

Or at least craft it a little bit.

*The word and is missing from the last line.