Letter to SCMP

I wrote a letter to SCMP today in hope of they could improve their typesetting.

There's no responce from SCMP yet.

Hello

I am a normal SCMP reader from mainland China, SCMP has been a really good source of my daily news digest to have a view from outside China and I enjoy it and rely on it very much since local news source is mostly censored and since valueless.

There are some suggestions though that I want to give from my own experience (and I am personally a web frontend developer as well) on the content organization of the page.

1. Some SCMP pages are organized without proper headings so that the whole page is listed as one entire content with no category or TOC(table of contents), which is not reader-friendly if I want to see the summary or the outline of the story. Now I have to read the whole page from top to bottom which is time-costly, sometimes I just have to skip it.
2. The videos between the article are good ways to give a rich experience for readers to understand the content of the page, but the autoplay attribute is quite unnecessary because normally the video will play just when it was scrolled into view, but user at the moment may just read at the top of the page, and normally when they DO read to the video part, the video is already ended. And the following irrelevant videos are distracting as well...

To make it more clear, let me give an example:

https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/2159831/how-wechat-became-chinas-everyday-mobile-app

This is a quite normal SCMP article with a moderate word count and multiple videos and an interactive demo of the history of wechat(the demo is super awesome).

But the problem is: first I can not grasp the whole outline of this page since I found this page quite long to read on the first sight. Readers today are normally very pragmatic and impatient(sadly). For a common reader, he will scroll to see the headings of the page trying to find something interesting, but sadly there are none headings to known from. Without a confidence of getting enough interesting topics to read, this reader may leave with frustration even tho he is indeed interested in the whole topic of the page.

Secondly, when he does read this page from top to bottom, he can not really enjoy the video because it will already be ended when the ready scroll there. Then it will auto-play another video and the user will not know what the video originally is, or if he continues to scroll down, the irrelevant video will still play on the side of the page and being kind of distractive.

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I like SCMP and I know that SCMP is a well-known guaranteed news source for a long time, but I hope that the reader experience could be improved as well.

Sincerely, Your reader.