A wide range of international affairs

This topic is broad, and so is the quality of writing. Because I deal with international security (both the topic and the journal, International Security) on a daily basis, I decided to find the good and bad websites among my competitors.

There are so many different journals that deal with international affairs that it's hard to search them all. I will grudginly say that my favorite is Foreign Affairs---grudgingly because it's our biggest competitor. Its homepage is done very well. At the top, it includes one feature article and one feature item. Below this, it includes very, very short descriptions of each article (generally in one sentence) that hook the reader. This impressed me, because I have to write these types of blurbs for our articles, and I cannot do it in one sentence! The homepage is not cluttered with descriptions of the journal itself, or the staff, or authors. It lists the authors of each article, but doesn't include lengthy (and I find annoying) bio info. Below this, it describes current events, also succinctly. Plenty of info in a small amount of words. Well done, in my opinion. (http://www.foreignaffairs.org/)

And for the bad: I was not a fan of the Journal of International Affairs website (http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/). This homepage gives no information about what the journal publishes. Instead of describing current articles (which seems to be necessary if a journal wishes to attract readers to its pages), the homepage gives a generic description of what the journal publishes ("a leading foreign affairs periodical") and explains in general terms who the contributors are. One must click further (http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/current.html) to find what I think is the relevant information for a homepage. Here, the only writing I found was bio info only, nothing on what the articles were about. This is not going to persuade me to read the article. On top of that, the bio info. differed in length (most of it was too long for a website---I had to scroll far just to view all the articles in the issue).

This is a good journal and publishes very prominent authors/scholars in the field, but the writing on the website does not live up to the writing in the journal. The writing on foreignaffairs.org, however, does.