Professor Yeti

Where do you get your news? These days, most organizations that once offered only television or printed news also have news websites. In theory you might guess that internet news gives organizations the chance to give the public some items that there isn’t time for on TV. On the internet there’s unlimited space for articles, while TV news stations can only cover news superficially in order to repeat the top stories for viewers who have just tuned in. TV news organizations also are concerned with holding the attention of a variety of viewers, while the internet can be accessed at different times by different users at their leisure. Do mainstream internet news organizations cover news with a broader and deeper stroke, or should you go back to watching the nightly news? In order to test this, I decided to look at a few internet sites of news organizations that also broadcast television news: Fox News at foxnews.com; CNN at cnn.com; and MSNBC at msnbc.msn.com.

At first glance, it appears that every site was designed by the same person — news stories are filed under categories under a few major stories of the day, while links to news topics are on the side. In a comparison of a top news story that all news sites covered, there were certain basic features that all sites offered: news clips taken from television, links to related stories, and pictures. I like being able to glance at the top news stories of each news category, and I also really like looking to the sidebar to choose the news I’m the most interested in reading about. In this sense, internet news already has an advantage over TV news: I don’t have to wait through stories about news that bores me to get to news I might find interesting.

After this preliminary comparison, I looked more closely at foxnews.com, which is known to have a conservative viewpoint. In a comparison of the French rioting coverage, Fox News had the most photos of any of the sites. However, its website also had the least diverse spread of news. The news here seems heavily weighted toward U.S. news, politics, business, and entertainment. I take this to mean that the average reader comes to this site looking for news in these topics, and that foxnews.com delivers it. In a country where the number of entertainment news magazines seems to grow each week, there’s obviously a market for celebrity news. It’s easier to find U.S. human interest stories here than any kind of hard news.

The real glory of the site is hidden away in a sidebar. It’s called Strakalogue: Grr! The point of this part of the website is for the writer, Mike Straka, to write a breezy article about something, anything that he finds annoying. Then Straka posts complaints from readers about what they find annoying. There is even a “Grr Lexicon” which readers can check to see how to classify annoying people, depending on the situation. Is your irritating friend an “Obliviot” or just an “Oblivion”? This is hilarious because of the obvious effort readers put into being irritated. Most people would probably shrug off a stranger standing in front of them for too long at the grocery store, but not these folks — they won’t take it sitting down!

Features like Strakalogue demonstrate that while foxnews.com may cover many different stories and seems to provide a lot of news, there isn’t real depth. For example, foxnews.com includes a feature that allows readers to click on a select word in order to learn more about that subject. When I clicked on “France,” I was shown a story about the recent rioting, a story about chocolates, and a story that didn’t have any obvious connection to France. These stories are typically short and offer news but little analysis. Sometimes, however, when you click on select words to learn more, the resultant search shows no hits! What’s the point of highlighting a word if there are no hits? Visit this site for Strakalogue and to take a break away from the “liberal media” — or just watch Fox News on TV; it’s basically the same thing.

MSNBC is associated with NBC news, so many of the video clips and other information is from NBC news affiliates. There are also links to several NBC television newsmagazines online, Newsweek online, and Washingtonpost.com. MSNBC also has several special reports on lifestyle topics and lists “Blogs, etc” under its news categories.

This site has a few extras besides the obligatory photos and videos. An extra feature I really like here is an interactive map timeline of the French riots. Each click of the mouse reveals the unfortunate spread of unrest on a map, with accompanying text. There’s also a link to Encarta showing background information on France. This site touches on root causes and possible effects of the unrest in France, but it’s difficult to find links to similar stories. I’d say that if you’re looking for some news and a bit of background information on current affairs and trends, this isn’t a bad place to go. However, if you’re looking for a deeper analysis you’re not going to find it here.

CNN, the last news site I looked at, offers the most internet extras, which seems right because I remember CNN being the first real 24-hour news program on TV. The extra features for the French rioting story include three videos relating to causes of the riots, possible results of the riots, and a questioning of French integration policies; an interactive map; and links to in-depth Time magazine stories. The stories go beyond a basic retelling of news; there are stories here that offer predications for how France will handle this situation, and how other European countries have dealt with integration issues.

For me it was quite fun to look through CNN’s news extras: besides reading the news and analysis, I could vote on a related question (“Would the recent violence across France influence your decision to visit the country?” — 67 percent said yes!), and even sign up to be alerted when similar stories are posted on the site. This is a great site to visit not only in order to learn of news, but also to learn why news happens. This is what internet news should be like.

As for going back to watching the nightly news on television, I was only joking about that — it’s too convenient for me to be able to choose the news that I want to read and forget about the rest of it, and it does seem like there are more chances to really find out what’s going on and why on internet news sites. So unless the nightly news changes to a topless dress code, it’s internet news for me.

Melinda Cameron lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia but she’s still working on becoming a Canadian.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 12:10 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.