Topix.net (www.topix.net)
The first thing a user probably notices at Topix.net is the breadth of information available. The site does not generate content, but is an aggregator plain and simple. It draws from thousands of outlets ranging from U.S. newspapers to wires to foreign news sites.
That diverse mix is evident from the headlines that fill the homepage. The top nine may feature nine different news outlets from nine different countries. Under those are three headlines from your home area ? something the site automatically identifies when you arrive.
Still, the site scored in the lowest tier of sites for depth, or making use of the potential of the web to go deep into a topic. Its rating here was hurt by the fact that it offered no archive and stories on the site existed as separate items, with nothing connecting related content together.
Topix.net scored somewhat higher, in the low-mid range, for customization. The site had strengths in that area ? users, for instance, can further customize the local news section by choosing from a list of 30,000 different U.S. cities. And if a user changes his or her home location, the site remembers it. Other kinds of customization found on other sites, however, were absent here. There was just a single RSS feeds and at the time of the study, there were no podcasts or mobile phone delivery options.
The site puts somewhat more emphasis on allowing users to participate in the site. It scored in the second tier here. The page?s entire right column is reserved for readers? comments, with a list of topics and the number of comments posted under each. Every headline also has a similar place for feedback.
As one might imagine with an aggregator site, the branding score for topix.com placed it in the bottom tier, with no content coming directly from the site and a computer program selecting the stories that appear on the front page.
Nor is Topix oriented to multimedia. It earned low marks in that category. Its home page was mostly text with roughly 90% of it being narrative. There were also no audio or video links.
The site also scored in the bottom tier for the level of revenue streams to the site. There was no paid content here and few ads.
That limited number of ads, though, helped with Topix.net?s clean-feeling front page. Ads are limited to the far right of the screen, after the user comment column. Here, too, localizing comes into play ? the ads are local ones from Google about everything from cars to jobs to court records.
Unlike other aggregators, such as Google, Topix doesn?t change the top news headlines all that frequently. While there is no human editor on the site (its headlines are selected by a computer program), the program operates at a little slower pace than others. At noon on January 10, 2007, its lead story was about the possible of the chief of Al Qaeda in Somalia had been up for seven hours. Other ?latest? stories had been there six hours, 10 hours and 13 hours. In other words, the stories that show up on the homepage are not just the latest wire copy. That can have the virtue of not piling the most recent story on top when it?s not necessarily the most important.
USA Today (www.usatoday.com)
As this report went to press, the Web site for USA Today underwent an extensive redesign. The redesign took steps to advance in several of the categories that we identified. It now offers more video and other multimedia components. It also facilitates more of an online community by allowing users to contribute their voice to the site and tailor it to their needs.
The study of the site?and this analysis?was performed in February of 2007, before these changes.
The Web site for USA Today carries over a lot of the newspaper?s look and feel. The blue USA Today header box is on the site as are the color-coded section names, a red box around Sports, a green one around Money, and so on. Other than a flash picture slide show on the top right of the screen usatoday.com feels a lot like USA Today online.
The site also has carried over the simple, modular layout of the newspaper. It essentially features a two-column layout, fewer than many of the newspaper sites we visited, that keeps things fairly simple. There is a lead story with a photo just under the masthead on the left and next it on the right is a list of six headlines, some with supporting material like photos and analyses and others without, and no teaser text.
But the impression that this is the newspaper in another platform is not entirely accurate. Indeed, this is one of the few newspapers that did not earn top marks for branding, or promoting its own content and editorial control. It scored in the second tier. To stay immediate, it relies heavily on wire copy.
Indeed, in our sit inventory, USAToday.com didn?t particularly stand out in any area. In our loose groupings, it was Jack of All Trades.
The site ranked in the second-tier on customization partly because of the large number of podcasts and RSS feeds available. That rating was also helped by giving users the chance to modify the home page. But the site is not as mobile as some others and offers no podcasts.
USAToday.com was also a second-tier finisher on multimedia . The site is not particularly text heavy; photos made up a larger percentage of the space. But there were no large audio or video components, and limited offerings, relative to other sites studied, in the way of video or audio links.
The site fell in the lowest tier relative to others when it came to the level of user participation. There was no chance for users to add content, no live discussions, and few chances to even e-mail authors.
And the site scored in the third tier for depth, the degree to which it linked stories in packages, or went deeper with paths to relevant archives, background, documents, interview transcripts and so on.
USAToday.com fell toward the middle in terms of the number of revenue streams on the site. There 13 ads on the page. The site does not charge for content, even its archive.
Unlike the paper, which publishes Monday through Friday, the site is always adding material, even on weekends, though it relies heavily on wire services to do that.
Staff people do sometimes contribute as news breaks, but much of the material comes from the Associated Press. Even in its lead positions the site is comfortable using wire copy.
On the afternoon of February 11, for example, six of the seven stories in the lead area were from the AP. That is particularly interesting since the site is owned by Gannett and could, in theory anyway, stock its page with stories from the papers the company runs around the country. The newspaper does pull stories from other Gannett papers at times.
Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com)
In contrast with some sites, particularly that of the New York Times, the Washington Post has gone out of its way to create a different identity on the Web from the one it has in print. The Web identity is high-tech and defined by multimedia and the ability of users to customize the site as their own.
The traditional logo of the paper is small and off to the side. The dominant masthead is the two-toned washingtonpost.com logo in black and red, which of course we do not see in print. The layout is a clean, three-column format, unlike the paper product.
In our content analysis, Washingtonpost.com scored highly in more categories than almost any other site examined. It was one of only two sites of the 38 studied, indeed, not to earn low marks in any category. And it was one of only four to earn the highest marks in three of our five content categories ? in our loose groupings, one of four High Achievers.
The site earned top marks for branding, or the degree of original content and editorial control. More than 75% of the content was staff written.
Yet the site also earned top marks in our content audit for customization. Visitors could create their own page layouts, subscribe to content through multiple and highly promoted RSS feeds, and arrange to receive a mobile version of the site.
And it was also a top-tier site for its use multimedia formats. A visitor is more likely than on most sites to find video, photo and Q&A links on the homepage. Live chats with Post staff members and newsmakers are featured prominently. All this also meant that the amount of plain text was smaller than on other sites. This destination is about more than reading stories.
The site earned second-tier marks for the level of user participation. That, however, still put it in the upper half of all the sites studied in a category where only three sites earned top marks.
The site was a high-scorer on economics, landing in the top tier with somewhere between 15 and 18 ads usually on the homepage. That includes advertisements for site features and logos of sister sites like Newsweek, Slate and MSNBC.
Washingtonpost.com earned its lowest marks for depth, in the third tier. That meant the site did not embed a lot of links in and around stories for people to go deeper, to background, documents, full text of interviews and various other options, including easy access to archives.
To some extent, given the nearly infinite set of options the Web offers that may reflect the fact that depth and immediacy are hard to balance. The content here starts out in the morning, as most newspaper sites do, with stories from the print paper, and throughout the day the site is updated to add new material.
The overwhelming majority of the stories, upwards of 90%, feature staff bylines. But washingtonpost.com is not afraid to run wire copy, particularly in sidebar stories that provide supplementary information around staff-written lead pieces. And the site takes great pains to include a lot of supplementary copy to go along with its featured pieces, including links to photo presentations, staff Q&As and interactive graphics. Generally, each featured story has at least two extra sidebar links.
Washingtonpost.com is a site that takes advantage of much of what the Web has to offer, adding a lot of interactivity to expand the paper?s identity beyond its print franchise of heavy coverage of the federal government.
The Week (www.theweekmagazine.com)
The online home for The Week, www.theweekmagazine.com, can best be described as exactly that ? a place for the online versions of the content that appears in the print title. It is a sparse environment, and appears by and large to be an afterthought.
Its narrow, three-column format is evocative of a magazine page and fills only about half the screen. Only the wider middle column holds real content, which is labeled ?In the Magazine?? and features a large photo. The narrow left column is saved for navigation. The current week?s cover image is displayed prominently in the narrow right-hand column (it links to a page where users can subscribe to the print version) and is followed down the page by ads. Users coming to the site are greeted by only three images and three story links on their first screen.
All told, there are 24 links directly to stories on the page, an extremely low number among the sites we examined.
There is no place for breaking news and no attempt at posting daily staff-written content.
In fairness, The Week?s format, which involves giving a weekly summary of news accounts from around the nation and world, may not really be suited to the Web. First, publishing more often online goes against The Week?s raison d?etre: the premise that people are overloaded with information and need a simple, short synopsis of events that they can carry with them. Second, if one wants a quick look at what?s going on in the world from several sources while online, online aggregators already offer many such services.
But that limited approach is ending. The magazine has announced it will soon launch a new Web site that will do on a daily basis what the title does every week ? condense news from around the nation and world.
Looking at the rankings in our site inventory, The Week was not a big winner in much of anything. It scored well in one category, branding, where it was in the top tier because editors choose what content goes on the page and all of it is generated in-house ? though it must be noted the content consists of summarize stories from other outlets.
In all other categories, the site was in the bottom tier. There were, in essence, no opportunities for customization.16 The page?s only multimedia only components were the photos it ran. There were none of the participation options (user blogs, author email addresses, live chats) we looked for on the site. The site was not updated during the day (in fact only once a week, at the time of our inventory) which hurt itsdepthscore. And the site had few ads ? only six ? and no fee content which placed it near the bottom in revenue streams.
While many people look at The Week as the print version of a Web aggregator, its Web presence pays little or no heed to the capabilities of the Internet or the on-line world?s 24-hour news cycle. It is the new-media home of a very old-media approach.
WTOP Radio (www.wtop.com)
Washington-based WTOP represents an entirely different look at radio online, one which is simultaneously local and national in scope. The homepage features an obvious lead story; an invitation to visitors to listen to WTOP radio news; weather and traffic information for the day; and a prominently featured local news section. Advertisements also have a heavy presence.
WTOP.com ranks in the top tier for offering customizable options. Users can subscribe to both RSS feeds and podcasts, and its RSS feeds are relatively varied (totaling 12 different feeds, all of which are different categories of news). WTOP also goes further than NPR in providing on-demand listening options: visitors can sign up for content delivery (headlines, weather, traffic and breaking news) to their mobile phones.
WTOP.com is still largely about narrative text (it makes up close to three-quarters of the content with still photos the second-most common form). Still, it did make some effort at multimedia forms (falling in the mid-level range of all sites studied) with some presence of video stories, slideshows, interactive graphics and yes, live streaming audio. Listening makes up only a small though prominent part of the Web site?s homepage with a section called ? Audio Center? that is devoted to live streaming of the WTOP radio station content.
The site puts less emphasis on its own original branded content, relying mostly on the A.P. The heavy use on wires reflects the larger reality of radio today ? even in Washington, D.C., national and international news comes heavily from sources other than the station itself. And even for local stories, only some had WTOP staff bylines; most came from the A.P., along with a few contributions from the Washington Post.
Economically, WTOP seems to emphasize revenue streams from its Web site, as opposed to simply leaning on its radio station for cash-flow. It averaged close to 20 different ads on its home page, only one of which was self-promotional. Ad eyeballs, it seems, are the way users pay for use of the site. All the content is free and there no registration is necessary.
Yahoo News (www.news.yahoo.com)
At first glance the news page for Yahoo.com looks a lot like a dumping ground for the newswires, particularly the AP. The top stories are all wire, as are the pieces in the secondary ?More Stories? area. But look a little closer and there is more going on here on this site. There is video from a number of sources, including CNN and ABC News. And further down the page there are tabs to look at headlines from a number of sources including NPR, USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, Congressional Quarterly, Business Week, Fashion Wire Daily and the Sporting News. Outlets specializing in specific topics are grouped under their topics headers ? like Business, Entertainment, Travel and Sports. The site is a mix of approaches seen on other aggregator sites. The news here makes a comprehensive ?newspaper? like page, but news is segregated by outlet.
In our site inventory, Yahoo?s news page didn?t really stand out in one category. It scored fairly well on customization, ranking in the second tier. Users could modify the page considerably and the site remembered the changes they made on subsequent visits. There were multiple RSS feeds and an advanced search option. But the site didn?t offer podcasts on its page or a mobile version.
It was also a second-tier site when it came to user participation. It offered a link to a page with user content, let users rate stories and offered most viewed and most emailed story lists. But there was no user blog, live discussions or polls.
Yahoo News scored lower on branding, in the third tier. It was hurt by the fact that it simply pulls material from other places, but the site?s human editors gave its score a lift. It also scored in third tier on depth, hurt by the limited number of stories it linked into packages. And it was in the bottom tier on multimedia. There are some video links here, but no audio and the page is dominated by text.
Its revenue stream also scored fairly low, in the third tier, with only eight ads on the page.
The strength of Yahoo News?s content is that it is always fresh. The site is put together by real people, not a computer program, and they apparently comb the news all day long looking to make updates. So at one point on March 7 the lead story was an AP account of an airliner that overshot a runway in Indonesia and a few minutes later it was a Reuters story about civil strife in Iraq. Users of the site, in other words, are not likely to miss the big stories of the day with human editors constantly updating the news. But if there is a drawback it is that those lead stories are wire stories ? long on facts, but often done as the news breaks and short on context.