Global Voices (www.globalvoicesonline.org)
Of all the Web sites we examined, Global Voices was in many ways the least conventional. The end result was that it scored high in several of the areas we measured. It was the only citizen media site that would fit our definition of a high achiever, a site that earned top marks in three of five content areas.
The site is non-profit, with an emphasis on relating information that the staff editors find interesting, not on providing the top news of the hour (or minute or day).
But Global Voices takes a unique four-step approach to identifying what is interesting. First, rather than searching stories from mainstream news outlets, editors cull through a vast number of blogs from around the world. The editors, who themselves are located across the globe, then decide which postings are worth passing on. Next, they add their own comments or background information to put the blog entries in context. Finally, when necessary, entries are translated into English, often by a different ?language? editor.
Take, for example, January 10. In the afternoon the lead was ?Philippine free press under attack.? The entry featured a lead-in by an editor noting that the Philippine press has been ?one of the freest in the world? since Ferdinand Marcos was deposed, but reporting that the current first family ?is harassing journalists by filing libel cases? against them. The post then ran blurbs from the Pinoy Press and the site Freedom Watch. The next post used the same approach to look at the Iraqi government?s efforts to register bloggers.
In our inventory, the site scored well, in the top tier, on customization. While its home page could not be modified by users, there were many RSS and podcast options available to users.
Global Voices was also one of only three sites studied to score in the top tier for depth. It did well because of the large number of stories it grouped together in packages and the archive it included.
The site also earned top marks for the degree to which it was offering a unique brand in which its own editorial process and judgment was emphasized. With thestories chosen by paid editors and with content that came from wholly staff, even when citing other sources, it exercised significant editorial quality control. The banner across the top of the page pays tribute to its many authors. The page?s logo and name sit next to the headshots of four bloggers, each one linking a short bio and a compilation of that blogger?s work. Each post then has the link to the original blog as well as a tag-line of the Global Voices editor. And running down a side column is the list of blog authors and the number of posts each has contributed to date.
The site also scored well, in the second tier, for user participation. It did not offer live discussion and interactive polls, two of the more controversial elements of web participation. But it contained a good deal of opportunity for users interact. In addition to the editorial choices, user content ? through a user-based blog ? is a big part of this site. At the end of each piece users are invited to ?Start the conversation? by posting comments, which are moderated by site editors.
The one content area where this remarkably well rounded site did not stand out is for multimedia. This site is about words, 95% of the content available from the home page was narrative.
The site?s score for revenue streams placed it in the bottom tier as well ? perhaps not surprising since it is a non-profit.
The strongest impression one has when visiting this site, however, is its international feel. The largest box of text is a list of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Next to that is a thinner blue box with a list of topics ranging from Arts & Culture to Governance to History to Youth. Under that is a slim one-line search box that runs the width of the page.
Global Voices is not a site to visit to get the latest headlines or find out what the media are talking about. But it shines a bright light on issues the big media often pass by.
Google News (www.news.google.com)
If you could constantly comb through thousands of news stories to cobble together a page of top news links from outlets around the world, you would be creating the front page of Google News. No person can do that, of course, but Google?s computer programs can. The result is a page that is broad, deep and somewhat serendipitous. Users never know exactly what they are going to get when they visit the site ? maybe the lead piece is from the New York Times and maybe it is from China?s Xinhua news service ? but Google?s algorithms ensure that many people are reading them. That determines what stories make it to the front page.
The stories also contain lots of links to other pieces on the same topics which is the why the site scored obscenely high in ourdepthcategory, not only in the first tier but far and away first overall. Stories were ?packaged? with hundreds of other stories to give users more links on any one topic than they probably know what to do with ? though often the stories are just the same wire copy repeated in many outlets. The site was also updated frequently.
Google?s news page scored fairly high on customizability ? in the second tier. Users can modify the page, choose from multiple RSS feeds and access a mobile version of the site. There are, however, no podcasts here.
In all other areas we measured, though, the site ranked in the last tier. Its multimedia score was hurt by the fact there is so much text on the front page. And opportunities for user participation are largely nonexistent. There are no user blogs, no ways for users to comment on stories and no polls to take part in. And, of course, the site?s branding score was bound to be low considering everything on the site is from somewhere else.
There is essentially no revenue stream for the content on the page, with no ads and no fee content from Google.
The content here is from well-known outlets from across the globe and that can make for some interesting reading. On March 6 for example, the top story in the afternoon was about the just announced verdict in the Scooter Libby trial, though the account was from Prensa Latina. The second story was a New York Times piece about the Mega Millions lottery jackpot, which was at a record $370 million. But other top pieces (running along the right side of the page) included a Business Week story about Michael Eisner?s bid to buyout the baseball card maker Topps and San Jose Mercury News account of Virginia Commonwealth University defeating George Mason in men?s college basketball. Users, of course, can ultimately shape the page as they want ? choosing what kinds of stories they want to see on top. But visiting Google News randomly can be a lot like going by a virtual newsstand that is constantly updated. What one takes away depends on when one stops by and where one looks.
KING 5 TV (www.king5.com)
The Web site of Seattle?s Belo-owned local television station, KING 5, stands apart from the average local-TV Web site. Its content, unlike many other local TV sites, is highly local. There is weather, a link to a free classified section, a box, updated roughly every hour, that spotlights developing local stories or other advisories, followed by three top stories that are presented as a package with headline, brief story synopsis, picture and at least one video clip.
But that layout is not a must. KING5.com earned its highest marks for being customizable. A button at the top of the page, ?Customize KING5.com? allows users to ?choose your news,? by constructing an individual news page with headlines they choose form KING5.com as well as other sites. The site also allows users to do advanced searches to find what they want on the site. And if you?d rather not come to the site, it will come to you via RSS, Podcast or even your mobile phone (a feature available on only on a handful of sites examined).
A major site redesign at the start of 2007 gave even more weight to the user. In October 2006, there was no way for the user to add their own voice?no way to comment or rate a story or even access a "most emailed" list. By February 2007, visitors who become ?members? (something they are prompted to do after a few clicks on the site) are encouraged to contribute to the site?s content. One of the headers along the top of the page along with ?news,? ?weather? and ?sports? is a link called ?interact,? and invites users to contribute photographs, engage in forums to discuss news, politics, sports and the outdoors, comment on King 5 blog entries, and contribute to the local calendar of events. With no way to directly email station staff, have a live discussion, rate a story, or see a list of the most emailed or linked to repots, there is still some room to grow. Overall, it falls in the mid-low level here for participation. But this is a site that is focusing more than many others on users.
The redesigned KING 5 site also increased its use of multimedia forms for its content, putting it in the mid-high category here. Just over half of the content on the homepage is text-based. The rest features video news clips, slide shows and interactive graphics like a two-way calendar of local events.
KING 5 does not place nearly as much emphasis as some other sites on its own branded material or content control. It fell in the high mid-range of sties studied. There is a place, called ?Investigators, designated to its news team?s original reporting? But these reports, primarily local in focus, appear only periodically: on January 30, 2007, the top 10 stories listed on the Investigator page were dated January 23, 2007 back to November 21, 2006. Over all, the primary source of content, for both video and narrative stories, is the Associated Press. KING 5 reporters have bylines for about half of the local news content, with the AP and other contributing sources (such as KGW.com) filling in the rest.
The site scored at the low mid level for depth. That, given the paucity of this characteristic in the sites studied, still ranks it better than many others. The site updates its content every hour, but again it is primarily with wire copy that does not offer many links either inside or along-side the story to provide readers with additional information.
Finally, for now anyway, visitors can use the site with little demanded of them. Registration is optional (though encouraged), all content is free including the archives and there are on an average of just five ads on the page.
Little Green Footballs (www.littlegreenfootballs.com)
Blogging from the right side of the political spectrum, Little Green Footballs has become a popular Web destination for conservatives by offering, largely, a critique of mainstream media coverage. It is of the category of blogs that focuses less on original content and more on aggregation. Much of the content is a few lines of author text tied to an excerpt or link from another online outlet. The entries are not always critical of the media, often pointing out approvingly stories the blog wants noted.
Like all the blogs we looked at in our inventory, Footballs scored highest on branding, landing in the top tier in that area, because its content all comes from the author of the blog, Californian Charles Johnson. Again, that is despite the fact that many of the entries on the page were largely content from other places. Even in those cases though, a few lines from the blogger usually introduced the item and put the excerpts in context.
The site didn?t score well in the other areas examined. It was in the third tier on customization. Though it did have a front page that users could modify, it had only one RSS feed and no podcasts or mobile version of itself available.
It sat in the bottom tier in the other areas we measured. It offers little in the way of participation. Users have no ways to interact with the site beyond posting user comments at the end of entries.
As for depth, the site offered an archive and updated fairly frequently, but it did not package links to give user a broader sense of issues.
The site was also not heavy on multimedia. All told, 84% of the page was made up of narrative text.
Again though, like Daily Kos, the site?s unique visitor number has helped with its revenue streams where it ranked in the second tier. Though it depends on ads there were a lot of them, just under 20 on the homepage.
The content of Little Green Footballs is diverse with a strong foreign-affairs tilt. Topics can range from domestic politics to the news media, but international news has a special place here. And while the site?s view on such issues always comes from the right, one can read the site and get a fairly comprehensive view of the subjects in the news. The first six posts on the site on the afternoon of March 6 were the verdict in the Scooter Libby case, the way the Huffington Post was blocking nasty comments about Vice President Cheney?s blood clot, the story of a possible defection of a former Iranian defense minister to the U.S., the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and a visit by German bishops to Israel. Little Green Footballs is a site for those wanting a conservative look at the news of the world.
Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com)
The online home of the Los Angeles Times is best known heading into 2007 for an internal study the paper conducted that was sometimes brutally frank about its shortcomings.
Our content inventory found the site crowded with material, but still organized. Latimes.com may not be a clean site, but it finds a place for everything ? videos, photos, blogs and, of course, text.
The site uses a four-column layout set against a white background, which helps prevent it from looking overwhelmed and cluttered. But the sheer amount of content on this page is impossible to ignore. The site tries to prominently feature as many as eight stories at the top and in the middle of the page, more than most of the sites we studied.
Framing the page down the left side is a lengthy set of navigational buttons. Over it all is the blue Latimes.com masthead, and over that in smaller is the Old English logo of the Los Angeles Times. In look, indeed, the site in some ways echoes the Washington Post in the sense of trying to create a distinct online personality that differs from the print product.
There is a lot of content on the site, and it helped Latimes.com score well in some areas of our site inventory. The site sat in the second tier on customization with its multiple RSS feeds and a mobile version of the site. It also gave users the chance to modify the homepage and saved those modifications for future visits. In terms of multimedia, it was also a second-tier site. It was not overly text-heavy and offered users many video links, but little else ? no audio, live discussion or podcasts.
The ability of users to post and add content helped the site?s user participation rating, placing it again in the second tier. It would have scored higher had it offered live discussion or other options. The site, in other words, seemed to have been constructed for more user participation. But the elements that would require staff to keep that opportunity fresh did not always materialize.
The site ranked lower, in the third tier, in another area that would require continuing attention, depth. That requires the kind of effort that occurs story by story, and probably involves team effort. It is also an area where most sites studied had room to grow.
Interestingly, LATimes.com also placed in the bottom tier on economics, or the number of revenue streams evident on the site. It offered fewer ads than most sites we examined ? only six ? and did not have any fee content or a fee archive. That may help explain why, according to the Times internal report, it generated less revenue for the company than other major newspaper sites.
In terms of content, Latimes.com may be based on the West Coast, but it is a national news site as well. The lead stories tend to have a few local entries, but the biggest headlines are usually national or international in their focus, and most are staff written. Wire bylines do appear on some pieces.
On February 14, for instance, the top stories for the site were about film makers in Hollywood, North Korea?s nuclear shift, the insurgency in Iraq, the Fed chairman Ben Bernanke?s feelings on the economy and the disappearance of a statuette of the Maltese Falcon at a local restaurant. The Bernanke story was form the AP, the rest from the staff. The smaller ?More News? headlines in the top tend to be local in nature, however, and the photos from users in ?Your Scene? are usually from California locations.
Video links on the site are a mix. Some come from the local news team at KTLA, some are Times-produced and some don?t have any attribution at all.
Over all, Latimes.com looks like something of a combination of Nytimes.com and Washingtonpost.com. It is a unique online entity that strives to be national in content with heavy multi-media options. But the potential in some ways seems unrealized.
Michelle Malkin (www.michellemalkin.com)
The blog of the syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin is clean and understated in its look, with a white background and a column of running posts from the author. But what may stand out the most about the blog is the lack of writing on it. Malkin, who writes a weekly political column for the Creators syndicate, seems happy to use the blog as a way to stay on top of breaking news, calling attention to news that she wants noticed without writing extensively online. That?s not to say there is a lack of viewpoint here. Malkin?s arch and sardonic conservative voice is clearly heard, but it comes in short, quick bites.
In our inventory, the site?s strength was its branding. It is all about Malkin, from the domain name to Malkin?s picture looking over the page to each item, which is posted by her. This is the writer?s online home. Michelle Malkin is the reason to go here, the brand and the appeal.
The site scored in the bottom tier in the other categories we measured. It offers users few chances to modify the site, our category called customization. There is an RSS feed, but no podcasts, no mobile version of the site and no way of altering the front page.
Malkin also scored low on participation. The site offered no way for users to interact beyond the ability to e-mail the author. Other than the picture of Malkin, the site was all text when we did our accounting, which led to a low multimedia score. There were no video or audio links and the page was 96% text.
And like other blogs itsdepthscore was low because the site didn?t package pieces together to give users context and breadth. The site also didn?t update as much as others.
As for revenue stream, Malkin?s site was also limited. There were only a few ads on the page (roughly five) and no for-fee content.
That said, the site isn?t really about those categories or about generating revenue. It seems designed to give Malkin an online platform to talk about the things she wants and extend her brand online. Its content allows her to do that. For instance, in a March 6 entry about the Huffington Post?s blocking users from saying cruel things about Vice President Cheney?s blood clot, Malkin wrote ?Huffington Post has disallowed comments on an article about VP Cheney?s blood clot. The first step toward recovery...? In a March 5 post about the Walter Reed Medical Center scandal, Malkin posted a ?Note to haters? in which she told people who questioned her critique ?I know perfectly well that Walter Reed is not part of the VA system. Duh.?
Michelle Malkin?s Web site is ultimately a place for her fans and detractors to go to find out what?s on her mind. On that score it is highly successful.
MSNBC & NBC News (www.msnbc.com)
MSNBC.com comes across as an amalgam. As the online home of NBC, MSNBC and the weekly magazine Newsweek, the site strives to give all three their due while at the same time creating its own identity. Those efforts, however chaotic they may seem, have succeeded in building an audience.
Unlike its performance on cable TV, MSNBC?s Web site (which launched simultaneously with the cable channel in 1996 as a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC) has long been one of the top three news sites on the Internet, with a monthly average of 26 million unique visitors.
What is in the brand that draws users to the site?
No one trait jumps out. In our study of 38 different news websites, MSNBC doesn?t strongly emphasize any one area. Indeed, it did not earn the highest marks in any category of content. But it scored fairly well at everything and did not earn low marks anywhere, one of the few sites that can make that claim. It really was a jack of all trades.
The site is word oriented. Roughly three-quarters of the stories on the homepage are text-based. Just 12% of stories took advantage of the video produced by either MSNBC or NBC. This puts it at the mid-low range of the spectrum for multimedia. On the days we examined, users could at one point access a slide show or an interactive graphic, but these were few and far between. There were no live components at all.
The lead story often has a video component attached to it, but most other video offerings on the page stand apart either within a section labeled ?Video? or under the header ?NBC News Highlights.?
A bigger draw may be the ways users can customize the news or add their own views, but even here the site doesn?t employ as much as others, falling in the mid-high range of the sites studied. Currently, the site has focused more on making its content mobile, rather than the site itself customizable. In November 2006, the Web site began offering free video podcasts of NBC?s Nightly News and Meet the Press. Earlier, in April 2006, the channel announced that a specialized, ad-supported version of the Web site would be available free on cell phones with Internet capability. MSNBC?s mobile phone service (called MSNBC.com Mobile) is available on all major phone networks. Initially it was only text, photos and podcasts, with a notice on the site saying that multimedia components were expected, but with no timeline mentioned.15 The new business model is seen to be a test to gauge how consumers react to advertising on their mobile devices. There are also additional RSS options.
The home page itself, though, is less flexible. There is only a simple key word search. And users can choose homepage layout, but only for the current view. At the next visit, it?s back to MSNBC?s design.
How about citizen voice ? web 2.0? MSNBC is not the top destination we found for users who want to be heard. There is no user-generated content, no user-based blogs, and no live discussion. There are a few ways to be heard. Some stories allow users to enter into an online chat. Also, users can rate a story and the results are used in a couple of different ways. First, the results for that story are posted at the bottom of the piece in a star system along with the number of ratings to date. Second, on each inside page is a list of ?most popular? stories at a given moment.
As the online home of multiple news outlets (even Newsweek?s own site often directs people here) it is not surprising that brand identity can get confusing. There is content from all of its family members?MSNBC, NBC, Newsweek?as well as the Washington Post and the wire services. In fact, wire stories make up a good portion of their top headlines. Staff editors control the content, but again, there seems to be a bit of a split over whether their mission is to promote the family names or the content itself.
The top stories of the hour command a good amount of the prime real estate. The next three sections promote reports from each of the three news outlets, followed by Web site-only content ? ?only on MSNBC.com.? Scrolling down the page, though, a visitor can eventually get to a list of content organized by topics in the news. The editorial staff also keeps tight control over where users go once they enter. None of the stories we examined ever contained links to outside Web sites.
Perhaps in the end, it is the revenue structure, or lack thereof, that attracts people to the site. MSNBC.com expanded how many ads it contained from September 2006 to February of 2007, but it still remained on the low end. In September there were just 7 ads, all of which were self-promotional. In 2007, a few more had been added, including one prominent outside ad per day and a list of ?sponsored links? at the bottom of the page.
Still, the most visible ones are self-promotional and are relatively unobtrusive.
The site doesn?t make up for the ad-free environment by asking users to pay. There is no fee-based content at all, not even the archive. Nor does the site demand that visitors reveal personal information; it has no registration at all.
New York Post (www.nypost.com)
Love it or hate it, there is little question that nypost.com brings the spirit of the tabloid paper to the Web, along with a great deal of the appearance.
So strong are the ties to the print edition that the homepage for the site actually looks like a tabloid paper, complete with the ruffled right side of the page where a reader would turn print pages. There is also what looks to be a rip just under the masthead, where the top stories change as virtual pages appear to be turned. The Post?s familiar red and black motif is on full display and pictures dominate the page. Top stories feature very large headlines that are usually printed on top of a photo, as in the print newspaper.
If the challenge of Web for newspapers in part is that a screen is much smaller than a broadsheet, Nypost.com offers a hint of how a tabloid online can be different.
Yet after offering the contents of the paper, with some additional multi-media features, plus making use of more multimedia formats, Nypost.com does not score as highly in our systematic audit as some other sites. The only area where it earned top marks was in branding, or the level of original content and promotion of its own editorial standards and practices.
The New York Post?s site is not very customizable, for instance; it ranked in the third tier of sites studied. It offered no podcasts and limited RSS feeds. Users were also unable to change the page in any way, and there was no mobile version of the site.
Nypost.comalso sat in the bottom tier on user participation, or the degree to which visitors can contribute. There is little chance for users to get involved beyond e-mailing authors. There was no way for users to add content, no users? blog and no interactive discussions.
It was also in the bottom group in depth, with few stories linked as packages, fewer updates than many sites and no embedded links in stories. And with few ads on the page and no fee content, Nypost.com also placed in the bottom tier of economics.
In its content, the Post?s Web site makes it clear that the organization believes its franchise to be ?shocking? stories, ?exclusive? photos and pieces about government malfeasance. All play a prominent role here.
In the three days after the death of the former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith, for instance, the Post was still leading with a story about her and the battle over her baby. ?MAD 'DADDY' IN HEIR RAID? read the headline.
Or consider the piece about how the state?s comptroller failed an economics quiz given him by a Post reporter: ?TESTY POL GETS ?F? IN FISCAL ED.? Along with those stories, the paper?s signature Page Six gossip page gets an entire section on the site with stories about movers and shakers in New York, celebrity photos and poll questions for readers. One showed pictures of the actresses Scarlett Johansson and Cameron Diaz and posed the question, ?Who?s Hotter??
New York Times (www.nytimes.com)
The look of the newspaper is still there, including the paper-white background and the distinctive old-English masthead. The work of the correspondents, their bylines and their reporting, still form the core attraction.
But while retaining the feel of print, the Web site of the New York Times, redesigned in 2006, is more subtly a customizable, participatory news outlet that covers the news as it happens.
Indeed, to a degree greater than for most newspaper Web sites, this really is the newspaper and more; it is the New York Times?.online.
That sense begins with the page?s design. Users will undoubtedly notice how wide the page is and how much information is there. The site is one of only a few with a five-column layout, another evocation of the newspaper, which has six columns. Most Web sites are three or four columns wide.
And the sense that this is the newspaper?s identity and brand in an online form is also reflected in the numbers from our content analysis. In our site inventory, the New York Times earns its highest mark for promoting and emphasizing its own brand and editorial control. Most of the content here, more than 75%, is from the Times staff. It promotes the bylines of its writers prominently.
Yet this is now more than a given morning?s newspaper. A visitor is also struck by the frequency with which the page is updated. Times correspondents are filing the news as it breaks, and then filling in more as the day goes on. There is a sense of the news breaking, the day evolving, the page changing; small red text indicates when a story first appears on the page. The site gives the impression of being in the Times newsroom and seeing as reporters come back and start filing. Even breaking stories on the site are usually written by the staff. Wire copy does appear in this lead story area, but it is usually replaced quickly by a staff byline.
Interestingly, the site has also found a way to use blogs to rely on wire copy less, at least ostensibly. For instance, the day of Anna Nicole?s Smith?s death, the site quickly had the story on its front page with a staff byline under ?The Lede Blog? header. When users clicked the link they were taken to a blog that largely quoted other sources. Thus the site ran wires, with the look of running staff copy.
Beyond its exceptional emphasis on the Times brand, in real time, the site offers a good deal more, though not as strikingly.
NYTimes.com also scored well ? in the second-highest tier ? for the degree to which it allows users to customize the content. It offers multiple RSS feeds and allows visitors to create their own homepage layout to greet them on each visit. It has yet to offer, though, the newer delivery mode ? mobile.
The site also makes some effort to allow participation. Visitors can e-mail authors now, and even add their own comments to stories and to blogs. The site scored, over all, high mid-range marks here.
NYTimes.com ranked in the bottom tier, however, for multimedia use. That may be somewhat deceptive, partly because most of its video links are on a separate page, not featured on the home page. That, again, reflects the fact that the newspaper is the core identity here, more than the site as its own environment. Yet even though the page incorporates some video and a bit of audio and graphic work, this is still by and large a text-heavy destination.
The site also scored somewhat lower, in the third tier, for depth, or the extent to which stories also linked to other material, original documents, background pieces, archival material and more. That, too, reflects its character; stories written by Times correspondents are what this site is about.
When it comes to revenue streams not surprisingly, the Times also scored highly. It features, in effect, everything that a Web site today could. It has a lot of ads ? 13 on the days we examined ? many of them small and unobtrusive. And it adds revenues from fees it charges for premium content.
Nytimes.com is leading example of a franchise that has decided not to create a new identity online, but to transfer the old one, enriched and modernized.
National Public Radio (www.npr.org)
NPR.org is becoming something of an identity unto itself, a destination offering substantially more than just radio programs moved online. The site leads with a top story usually presented as a package with multiple links and multimedia components. That is followed by a list of other top news stories, which, once accessed, are offered as both audio and text.
Below the top stories comes a mix of news content, including a list of top e-mailed stories (updated continuously), a sidebar of news topics for further reading/listening, and Associated Press headlines.
Amid all this content is a clear sense of the NPR brand?a clear emphasis of this site, and a category where it got some of its highest marks. The vast majority of stories posted on the site are researched and written by NPR?s staff, something it accentuates by offering bylines to most stories as well as links to the author?s biography. In addition to the NPR content, the site augments its stories with a limited selection from the A.P.
The other area where NPR.org excels is in allowing users to customize the NPR content to their own interests or needs. Both RSS feeds (?really simple syndication?) and podcasts are prominent features, situated in the upper left-hand column of the homepage. The RSS link takes users to a page where they can choose to receive particular categories of news feeds (e.g., opinion), specific programs (e.g., Morning Edition), topics (e.g., children?s health), or particular member-station feeds (e.g., KQED in San Francisco). All in all, there are 52 categorical RSS feeds and 19 member station feeds. Another feature extensively employed on the NPR site is podcasts. The podcast link from the homepage takes the user to an extensive directory of podcasts organized by ?this week?s picks,? topic, title and by station provider. As of February of 2007, though, the site had yet to embrace the latest trend of mobile phone delivery.
NPR.org was in the mid-level range when it came to use of multimedia forms. Audio features were prominent, with some live streaming options, podcasts and other MP3 downloads. These are supplements, though, to the more common text and photo elements on the home page. And, the site did not offer video content.
Clicking further inside the site, however, reveals more of a multimedia feel. Once users click on a story headline from the main page, they are taken to the transcript of the story (or a synopsis) and are then presented with the choice to read or listen to the story. Indeed, NPR.org stands out in offering about 85% of its content simultaneously as textual narrative and audio streams or podcasts.
A big question facing all online entities is one of economics. NPR.org hosted only two advertisements on its home page, one self-promotional, the other a PBS logo. Still, it does find a way to draw in some revenue. The site charges users for some archive material: $3.95 for a single archived transcript, or $12.95 for a monthly subscription to the archive (up to 10 transcripts).
OhmyNews International (english.ohmynews.com)
Lying somewhere between globalvoices.com and digg.com, OhmyNews International is a hybrid of citizen journalism and news editing. As with Digg, all the content comes from users, in the format of news stories rather than blog entries. There is also a heavy emphasis on narrative text. But, as with Global Voices, the editorial staff plays a heavy role in the internationally focused content. The approach in the end gives users a lot of ways to contribute and be heard but with strong brand identification.
The site itself is based in Korea, though the international version is posted in English. Although the content all comes from users, the site is far from an open forum or a clearinghouse for stream of consciousness. Potential reporters and writers must apply and accept the conditions laid out by the site, and if ?hired? are paid for their work.
The process of submitting reports operates a lot like that at more traditional news outlets. There is a heavy editing process that instills a uniform style, which in the end reads a lot like a straight news or analysis piece. The contributors here are hybrids ? edited citizens.
The diverse mix of largely international topics speaks to the individual interests of the citizen journalists who filed them. Stories come from around the world. On the afternoon of January 11, the lead item on the page was Part 3 of a series on the ?History of French Nuclear Tests in the Pacific.? The next piece was a story on women in Africa using cell phones and the growth of mobile technology there. It was followed by a story about a Japanese politician visiting Pyongyang.
In addition to the stories themselves, the editors use a fair amount of the homepage to highlight certain features or help visitors find what interests them most. Next to the lead stories is a slimmer column with content the site is emphasizing in some way ? special-report sections, podcasts, pieces on citizen journalism and a list of that week?s ?Featured Writers.? And on the right is a map of the world showing the areas generating the most media attention, more featured-site links and headlines from the International Tribune.
Farther down are headlines arranged by topic area ? Korea (the site?s home), World, Technology, Art & Life, etc., and finally a list of the most recent posts to the site.
As such, OhmyNews International sat in the top tier on branding. There is no wire copy on this site and the home page decisions are made by staff, not computers. What the site offers, instead, is branded controlled citizen journalism. If the number of citizen journalists posting to OhmyNews International continues to grow, one would expect the topics and regions covered to grow as well.
Thus, while the site may currently be the home of various bits of international news that have fallen through the cracks of mainstream journalism, it may be something very different in six months or a year
The site scored fairly well on user customization, in the second tier. It was helped by offering multiple RSS and podcast options high on the page. Visitors could not, however, remake their own homepage or get a mobile version of the site. As with Digg and Global Voices, multimedia was less of a focus, it placed in the last tier in that area. There was no video and no live streaming audio and, while the site is made up of content from citizen journalists, no blogs per se.
The site scored highly, in the second tier, on user participation. The site, obviously, has a lot of user content. It did not, however, accommodate live discussions, or the use of online votes.
The site did poorly in the rankings fordepthand economics. Itsdepthscore was hurt by not updating as often as other sites and not packaging stories together. And ads are largely non-existent on OhmyNews International. From its base in Korea it has a variety of Korean corporate ?partners,? most notably Samsung, but there are no real ads on the homepage and the only ones on interior pages are Google ads.
The Online NewsHour (http://www.pbs.org/newshour)
The online home for the NewsHour is a lot like the program itself ? it is focused on a few topics and doesn?t overwhelm the user with charts, graphs or information. A calm and deliberate site, the Online NewsHour uses a two- or three-column format to offer stories from the previous night?s program. Pieces are available in text, audio or video format. The name of this Web site sums it up fairly well. It?s an online version of the program.
In our site inventory, the Online NewsHour scored highest, in the top tier, in branding. This content comes completely from the program. The site does not rely on the wires or other outlets for news and it is put together by a human editor, not a computer program.
The site also ranked fairly high on customization, in the second tier. There was no way for a user to modify the front page, but there were a large number of RSS feeds and podcasts available to customize content delivery. The site also achieved a second-tier ranking in multimedia. It was relatively light on content overall, and almost all of what was there had audio and video links attached.
The Online NewsHour sat in the bottom tier of all the sites we examined for user participation and depth. Other than through occasional email addresses alongside the reporter?s byline, there was essentially no way for a user to interact with the site. And itsdepthscore was hurt because it isn?t updated often and doesn?t offer embedded links in most stories.
As one might expect with a public TV site, the Online NewsHour doesn?t have a strong revenue stream, but it was in the third tier ? not the bottom one ? with eight ads on its home page.
As for the site?s content, it is largely repurposed NewsHour items, offered in multiple forms and with a few added features. Along with the audio and video links, there are links to past stories and external links to sites of interest. For instance the lead piece on January 9th was a transcript from the January 8th show, but it also included maps, lists of ?key players? and a timeline among other things.
NewsHour is definitely not a site to visit if a user is looking for the latest news on a large variety of topics, but for focused coverage on a few ? usually very current ? topics, it offers a lot.
Reuters News Service (www.reuters.com)
Like 19 th century wire service of its name, the main thrust of the Reuters web site is the latest news headlines. The page is filled with news reports across a wealth of categories? U.S., international, Investing, business, science, and many more. As the wire service is known for, the reports themselves are unadorned, focused primarily on articulating the information at hand. A few key features though?one of which is it being open to the public?moves the Web site beyond the image of the age-old wire service.
Overall the site scored in the highest tier in only one area?editorial branding?and the lowest in four.
With staff reporters spread throughout the world, Reuters has no trouble filling its vast pages with original, bylined content, giving it the highest score possible for editorial control and branding. Branding here does not imply voice, but conveys the more traditional sense of original content and strict editorial practices. The bylines are clearly there for added authority and accountability rather than to feature the voice of staffers.
For a news outlet that was never before even available to the general public, Reuters places a good amount of emphasis on allowing the public to make the web offering their own--customization. Users can create their own home page structure to greet them each time they return, can subscribe to multiple RSS feeds and have news delivered to the mobile phone. The ability to search their vast array of content is more limited, with only a simple key word option and for now anyway, the site had skipped over the podcast phenomenon.
User participation and multimedia use appear to be not so highly emphasized. Beyond the ability to email the author of a news story, users must keep their views to themselves. When it comes to story forms, Reuters has initiated quite a strong video news service with many stories offered both as narrative and video reports. Other media forms, like live streams, Q & A?s and user polls are left for other sites.
The site also fails to take advantage of the potentialdepthof news stories. Though constantly updated, the site does not embed links into the news reports and often does little to try to link stories together.
For revenue, the site at this point relies more on advertising than on direct user fees. The site averaged 7 different ads on the home page with all content and archive material a free service for visitors.
Salon.com (www.salon.com)
Salon.com has often been thought of as Slate?s less affluent and smaller sibling ? it was launched at roughly the same time, 1995, also as a Web-only magazine. Salon.com in 2006-07 is an attempt to carve out a niche as a place where ?you?ll directly support independent journalism,? the site says. The result is something akin to an online version of Mother Jones, much more predictably liberal than Slate, with a few dashes of pop culture and sports thrown in.
It also differed in the scores it earned. The site stood out for promoting its own branded content, where it earned top marks. In every other category, Salon by our metrics earned mostly low-mid range scores.
Upon reading the content, the brand becomes quickly evident. Reports generally feature a first-person voice. Politics is a mainstay, but there is also a lot of culture as well. And often the two come together, such as the January 22 review of movies at the Sundance Film Festival. ?You can start out a weekend at Sundance, as I did, irritated by all the minor inconveniences of this place,? the review began, ?and end it as I also did, sitting in a roomful of strangers weeping at an impromptu late-night speech delivered live by Dick Gephardt.?
Also striking is the number of ways Salon.com aims at raising revenue. There are five outside ads on the site, split between two advertisers and a prominent advertisement for joining Salon Premium for $35 a year. That membership gives users access to Salon.com?s discussion forums and the ability to skip ads on the page as well as some benefits that have nothing to do with Salon ? subscriptions to Wired and The Week. Despite this, the site was in the third tier of our revenue streams category in part because it didn?t feature many ads ? only eight.
The site had been redone between the time of our inventory, October, and the New Year, and had added podcasts and video to its homepage. It did not score highly in most categories in our examination, however.
It was in the third tier in terms of customizability. Users could not modify the home page and there was no mobile version of the site available ? though the site would have ranked somewhat higher after its additions. The same could be said about its multimedia ranking, where it was in the bottom tier. The big video link now on the front page would have lifted that score as well.
Its score for the level of user participation, also in the third tier, was unchanged though. There are live discussions and users can email story authors, but the site does not include user content or things like polls. Its third-tier depth score also would have been the same. The site?s relatively infrequent updates ? three a day ? helped keep the figure low.
San Francisco Bay Guardian (www.sfbg.com)
The San Francisco Bay Guardian is one of two alternative weekly newspapers in San Francisco, and one of the few papers in the country that is still independently owned. Like most ?alt-weeklies,? it is known for its local investigative pieces and extensive entertainment listings. Its online version is pretty much the same thing?literally. All of the reported pieces come straight from the current week?s print edition. The web specific content comes if two forms. A right-hand column highlights (in red-text that often runs together) a list of daily ?picks??cultural events about town. Second, a block in the upper left-hand column offers five blogs. The blogs?one on music, arts and culture, politics, San Francisco and a featured blog by Bruce Bergmann?provide more recent musings than those in the print edition, but are not nearly as active as some. On the days we studied, the most recent postings on most of the blogs were four days old.
As a site that mostly proffers it print-work along with city calendar listings, it scores low in most areas of Web potential. Its highest ranking, not surprisingly, is in the editorial brand. The work is all by SFBG staff. The report?s byline is often not only attached to the story, but featured on the home page along with the headline. Voice is clearly a main thrust of the site.
It welcomes visits but doesn?t do much to compete with other online options. The ability to email authors and post comments to stories or blog posting gives the site a few marks for user participation, but there are no options beyond that, keeping it in the low to mid tier in this category. customization is even scarcer with a simple key word search as the only way users can take control of the headlines they see. How about multimedia? Suffice it to say in our study we found 95% of the content to be straight narrative. The other 4% was still photos.
When it comes to revenue streams, the site has spent some energy placing ads?an average of 8?prominently on the home page. If you don?t mind wading through these, the rest of the content is available for free. Registration is optional and all past editions of the paper (and website version) are available free of charge.
Slate (www.slate.com)
Though it is one of the pioneers in the world of Web journalism, most Americans who regularly visit the Internet for news are probably at least aware of Slate, the online magazine founded in 1996 by Microsoft and run initially by Michael Kinsley, the highly regarded editor who helped revive the New Republic in the 1980s. Since it began, Slate has gone through several redesigns, a change in editors and a change in owners.
Through it all it has retained a distinctive look, feel and approach. Of all the sites examined, Slate probably uses visuals the most prominently ? almost in place of headlines.
In our content analysis, Slate might be called the site that offers Its Brand, Your Way. The site clearly is offering a team of writers and commentators, with a high degree of editorial quality control. But, it also stood out for the level of customization allowed. It was one of the few sites studied, along with NPR, to stand out for that particular combination.
The opening screen features several prominent photos or cartoons, each linking to a story or feature. There is text on the page, but the pictures dominate. The lead piece in the center of the page, twice as wide as any other column, is anchored by a photo. The headline for the piece even runs within the picture, and there is no teaser text. Under that lead item are five smaller items lined up in a row, each with a small photo and a headline.
Slate may be owned by the Washington Post and have an affiliation NPR, but its content is its own. There are no links to pieces from the Post or the wires on the homepage to give users the latest stories. From the beginning the site has taken great pride in its editorial voice ? usually ?smart? and often counterintuitive. The pieces rarely stress reporting, but rather about offering different views on topics in the news. On January 19, for instance, the lead article for the site was ?How the Camera Phone Changed the World ? For the Worse.? The piece recounted the rise of the camera phone?s prominence in news events, such as Saddam Hussein?s hanging. ?A camera on a phone has only aided the perverted, the nosy, the violent, and the bored,? the piece opined. As such, it scored at the very top of the sites studied for branded control of its content.
It earned its high marks for customization with multiple RSS and podcast options featured prominently. Mobile phone delivery was also available back in September; a feature found only on a few of the sites studied.
The site also put notable emphasis on allowing users to participate. They were welcomed to comment on stories. There were links to most-read and most-e-mailed stories and there were ways to e-mail the authors of stories.
After quality narrative and giving users a lot of room to participate and customize the site, Slate became more typical.
Even with the heavy use of photos, the site scored in the bottom tier for multimedia potential. On the days monitored, 85% of the content on the front page linked to narrative text only. There is some presence of video, slide shows and interactive graphics, but despite a partnership with National Public Radio there were few audio links.
It also is not doing much to exploit the potential of the web for depth. Its score there was hurt by updating less often than other sites and by not packaging related stories together.
When it came to the level of revenue streams evident on the site, Slate scored in the low mid range, second from the bottom. It boasts relatively few ads and its experiment with paid subscriptions was abandoned some years ago.
Slate has grown immensely, adding new features and blogs in its 10 years, and is climbing the ranks of most-visited sites. And in an age when people are pointing to multimedia as the Web?s next wave, Slate seems happy to stake it position as the Web?s version of the New Yorker ? relying heavily on writing but minus the heavy reporting, of course.
Time (www.time.com)
At the start of 2007, Time revamped and re-launched its Web site. It added new features, limited its color palette and cleaned up a site that was fairly cluttered. The new site is more organized and simpler without being sparse. It looks and feels more like the online home of a new Web outlet than it did before and less an online parking space for the magazine.
Still, some of what we found on the site in October still held true in January. For instance, the first thing a visitor is likely to notice is that Time is not alone here. Signs of its partnership with CNN ? another news outlet owned by Time/Warner ? appear in the header. But there is more brand differentiation now than before. In the earlier incarnation, the site offered ?The Latest Headlines from CNN.? That has been replaced by ?Latest Headlines,? which lists 10 news items from a variety of sources, CNN among them.
The new Time.com is also an environment more distinct than before from the print magazine. The image of the current week?s magazine cover, for instance, is pushed further down on the page, rather than appearing in the top right hand corner.
One thing the old and new sites have very much in common, however, is that everything here is still free.
Visually, the new Time.com uses a cleaner three-column format as opposed to the four-column approach it used to have. And while the old site had pictures scattered all over it, the new one features only a changing slide-show picture, with an ad on the right side and a row of three photos in the section below. The layout is modular.
The old cluttered Time.com was not without its advantages. It was one of the more customizable Web sites, finishing in the top tier in part because it offered several different RSS feeds, podcasts and a mobile version of itself. It also finished in the top tier for branding, using human editors to make decisions about layout (rather than computer programs) and using bylines on staff copy. The site also relied heavily on its staff for lead stories ? more than 75% of its lead pieces carried staff bylines.
It scored lower, in the third tier, in depth. Its score was hurt by offering fewer updates than other sites (something true of most magazine sites) and not using embedded links to take readers further into a subject
Time put even less emphasis on multi media (it finished in the bottom tier). This is a text based Web site. It also earned the lowest marks for user participation. It offered users little in the way of communicating or reacting, not even the opportunity to send emails to authors.
Time also does not have a significant number of revenue streams on the site at this point. It did not have many ads ? eight ? and it did not charge for any content.
The new Time.com seems to place less emphasis on allowing users to customize it ? it certainly highlights customization less?and is more focused on presenting users with a clean, uncluttered first view of the page. It still has multiple RSS feeds and podcasts, and a link to get a mobile version of the site, but those links are at the bottom.
On the other hand, blogs have multiplied. Andrew Sullivan?s Daily Dish is still here (though Sullivan announced that his blog was moving to Atlantic.com), and it has been augmented with blogs about Washington (Swampland), The Middle East and entertainment (Tuned In). The site also added a column called ?The Ag,? which stands for aggregator, which talks about what?s news in other media.
Interestingly, the redesign actually left the site with fewer ads. There were a total of four in September, placing it in the bottom 10 of the sites we looked at. But there were only two in January and they were coordinated for the same product ? Bentley College. That approach, also taken by Economist.com, makes the ads feel more like an integrated part of the page and less noisy.
The strength of Time.com is its willingness to reach beyond its own pages for content. There is a lot here. The 10 stories in the ?Latest Headlines? box are usually wire copy, but they do at least offer users a link to major breaking news. And such fare as Andrew Sullivan?s blog not only brings more outside content to the page, its teaser text can definitely bring a different flavor, as it did on December 9, 2006: ?If the Democrats have the balls to restore our constitutional order I may have to stop being an independent for awhile.? Not exactly journalism in the tradition of Henry Luce.
Perhaps most interesting, the new Time.com does not make a point of offering content from the magazine. The daily stories from Time?s staff, on the page?s top left, are often shorter than magazine stories and feature either a different tone or some exclusive tidbit, and Time.com clearly differentiates between them and the stories on the rest of the site. And articles from the actual magazine are hidden down the page under the image of that week?s cover. Users have to click the image to get to those pieces.
It all amounts to a step toward a Web environment that is more than the magazine, with plenty of short items and Web-only content. That is what Time promised in the summer of 2006 when it said it was going to turn to the Web more and more, particularly on breaking news.
Continue lendo "Site Profile" parte 3