It seems like CNN likes to publicly (but indirectly) display their reader stats. A new website feature that I noticed recently is their “CNN Trends” section on the homepage. When you click on the image link, it directs you to a page with what seems like to be the most popular topics/search word on the site at the time. The very top of the web page doesn’t tell me much information about this CNN feature other than the fact that it is “Fueled by Zite” and to “Find out. With Zite.”
However, after scrolling down to the bottom of the webpage, the site explains what this particular section is: “CNN Trends is a computer generated list of socially buzzworthy topics and articles. The CNN Trends team is constantly working to improve our content generation algorithm.”
I’m not sure how fancy their algorithm is but it might just be tracking what people search in the CNN search bars and the amount of traffic certain articles and topics get on the website.
Similar to the NewsPulse feature that I wrote about in the last post (which interestingly enough, is no longer on the site) you can tailor CNN Trends to only show stories in a specific section (e.g. Entertainment, Tech, Living, Travel, Politics) rather than from the general site.
(Update 12/17/2012: NewsPulse is back. It either never left and I couldn’t find it or it was gone when I tried looking for it.)
While it’s intriguing to see what the most popular topics in the nation are currently, I don’t understand the point in providing about ten links to the same story (for some stories). For some of the the topics (e.g. politics and the election), the links directing you to other articles vary greatly in angle, viewpoint, and opinion. However, other topics (e.g. the hard news stories) basically just offer links from different news websites and blogs to the same story with the same information (but written by different people).
It’s nice that CNN Trends links you to other main news websites from Mashable, the New York Times, BBC, NY Post, Chicago Tribune, and Politico, to more local news outlets and providers such as Hawaii News Now and The Cleveland Leader, and even to smaller interest-specific sites like Space.com and Gawker. CNN is successfully providing alternate news sources with different views. By doing so, CNN seems to be displaying themselves as an unbiased, nonpartisan news organization, which (it seems that) they been trying to do for a while now.
The YouTube video and photograph gallery links are also a nice complement to the news stories. These other media forms do round out the stories and articles well. It also provides an alternate means of learning about a specific news story if you don’t feel like reading about it. You can watch it instead!
However, when examining what it is exactly that Americans are interested in, it’s a bit disconcerting that Taylor Swift is among the hot topics our nation is discussing right now. We also seem to be obsessed with our electronics and new technology.
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