Digital Writing Style: The Skimm

Photo Credit: Tenzin Tsepel
This is a bird's eye shot of a table layout at the store Muji.
It symbolizes cleanliness and organization- two factors that are needed when utilizing hyperlinks.

The Skimm uses various, boldly colored hyperlinks to help add to the content within the summarized emails. Hyperlinks not only give the reader more context and content but it also gives The Skimm, or the publisher, metrics to base data research and monetization off of. An opened email may or may not show interest in a certain topic but a link clicked gives direct reference to the point at which the reader decided that he or she wanted more information.

Hyperlinks can be extremely effective when used intelligently. In the past, I've written articles regarding topics in the advertising technology industry and when I used hyperlinks to refer back to other articles I was taught to hyperlink verbs that alluded to the article. An example would be "T his past Monday it was reported that Apple released a new iPhone model." Instead of adding a hyperlink to "new iPhone model" I would add the hyperlink to "reported" because that would link back to the original report where the initial information was taken from. The Skimm also uses a similar format of hyperlinking and, in my opinion, this is the most effective and efficient.

Some potential weaknesses to hyperlinks could be overusing them. If hyperlinks are scattered too many times throughout an article, the text can seem busy and it's unclear which links matter more than others. Another potential weakness could be citing back to an incorrect source. Rather than linking back to an original source you could accidentally link back to a similar news-related site than could potentially grab your audience and readers.

Overall, hyperlinks are an extremely good way of efficiently providing your reader with more content and context within a summarized medium like an email.