How does your site designate the difference between a column and a regular story.

We're having a discussion where I work on how to make it clear to online readers when a story is a column vs. a regular story.

I'm curious both what you do at your place or what you've seen elsewhere that you like.

 

Column bug, ragged right, shirt tail.

 

Good god, the apocalypse has truly arrived now.

 

We did all that at one of the biggest and best papers in Texas, and still we finally had to run an italics lead-in line at the top of every column that said: "This is an opinion column."

Also, we did that at the request – plea, demand – of the columnist, who had grown tired of/couldn't handle all the vitriolic emails he kept getting from Jim Bob and Peggy Sue Shitkickers.

 

Yeah, I found by the end you had to essentially put the word OPINION in all-caps and bold in the bug of a column to not get hate mail.

I’d love to know the exact year media literacy completely tanked. Feels like late aughts, maybe?

 

All of which is great if the readership understands that not everything on the page is an opinion.

Mostly, however, they do not.

Which is why it's been so easy to turn them against the press.

Oh well.

See also, every book is a "novel."

 

We slug it as opinion.
Seems the accompanying driver's license-looking pic of my mug helps, too.
Adding to Azrael's comment above, though ... if by then the reader cannot figure out by his/her own accord that it's a commentary piece, I question their overall intelligence.
As it is, reader response columns based on knee-jerk reactions can be a lot of fun.

Free associating here, but those of us old enough to remember Eric Sevareid might recall his commentaries on the Cronkite broadcast were slugged as such. Didn't watch Howard K. on ABC or Brinkley on NBC as much. Anyone remember if ABC and NBC did the same?
Anyway, if the old rules applied today, the opinion slug would almost need to be a permanent chyron.

 

I'd guess 75 percent of the time (maybe more), it isn't that they can't figure out that it's an opinion, it's that they don't care. The quest to pound their chest and scream at the top of their lungs overrides any desire to be correct.

 

Previously, we've run the columnist's mug as the accompanying photo online (which looks lovely since our software doesn't resize/crop the photo accordingly). We've also run whatever the name of the column is in all caps at the start of the headline.

 

Another small device we use is we put all the news OPINION columns on a page of its own with a great big page header that reads OPINION.

Sometimes it has a funny drawring on it.

 

The other times it has Mallard Fillmore on it?