An interesting feature that I came across on CNN.com recently is their “NewsPulse” section on the main page. In my first post, I had described how unnecessarily cluttered and disorganized the main page seemed to be so I would have easily overlooked NewsPulse if I wasn’t thoroughly checking out each subcategory offered on the website.
CNN.com’s NewsPulse, located among the slew of text on the main page
The feature’s tagline, “Get the news filtered the way you want and see what’s popular,” is not the most exciting but covers the function and purpose of NewsPulse well enough. The default settings of NewsPulse is set to display all of the stories on CNN.com in order of descending popularity from the last hour. It also shows when the news story was last updated, the number of comments posted, and the number of Facebook shares for the particular news story. The filter on the side allows you to enable only certain categories of news stories such as U.S., World, Health, Living, and Money.
An additional filter allows CNN to show only stories, interactive articles, videos, and/or blog posts. You are also able to see what the most popular stories were from the last 15 minutes, hour, 24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days, and up to 30 days of your last check-in with CNN.com.
While this is a good way to sort of “keep in touch” with the rest of the nation in news-reading and stay updated with the most popular and talked-about news, it is also interesting to see which news stories the rest of the nation considers to important enough to read. It would be cool to see if there are specific trends.
Checking each individual filter allows me to see that the most popular stories actually happen to be videos rather than articles. Clicking “show details” allows you to see the actual video imbedded in the page rather than opening up a separate webpage and it also shows the number of Facebook likes the video or story has collected.
News stories that were popular within the last 15 minutes appear to be primarily videos:
While news stories that were popular within the last 30 days are primarily articles:
The titles of news stories and videos range from serious international news (“14-year-old activist wounded by Taliban”) to the ridiculous (“Man dies after roach-eating contest”). I’m not entirely sure which is more disconcerting–the fact that the roach-eating man story is the third most popular video or that 18 other videos and stories are more popular than the 14-year-old activist video.
However, it is clear the U.S. stories are considerably more popular than the stories in the “World” subcategory:
The most popular U.S. news within the last hour
The red bars on the left side offer a nice, clear visual of relative popularity:
The most popular “World” news, in the last hour
When clicking on individual filters, some trends are easier to see than others. For example, the video “Bristol Palin talks tearful ‘DWTS’ fight” is far more popular than any other Entertainment news right now (or in the past hour at the time):
It would be interesting to see how the popularity of the news stories change throughout the day and throughout the week. While the NewsPulse feature may not show you the most important news (though it probably shows the most entertaining news), seeing what the rest of the nation is reading is entertaining in itself.
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