Kind of.
While this is the last time I’m on CNN.com to analyze and blog about what I see, I highly doubt this is the final time I visit their online news site. CNN is a global media powerhouse, and will continue to be ubiquitous and relevant a long time from now.
CNN’s national and global influence on their regular readers (and their non regulars) is highly respectable and for good reason. Their extensive network of reporters, journalists, and other media experts in countless countries results in excellent international and national coverage alike. (According to Wikipedia, CNN programming “can be seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories.” !)
Sarah Hoye, who was also once a student in my Online Journalism professor’s class, is now an all-platform journalist for CNN. She reports, writes, records, and edits all of her own material for CNN. Her Skype guest appearance during one of our classes was highly informative as my classmates and I witnessed her drive to maintain the integrity of her work for CNN through the sleepless nights that came along with it.
Although CNN.com has its fair share of silly, pointless videos and articles, they provide impressive coverage when it counts (see my “CNN’s Post-Election Coverage” post). Even when they post unimportant (to most people I know) news about celebrities and where the nation’s most attractive citizens reside, they are well aware that some of their videos are completely pointless. However, CNN.com offers a clear (albiet indirect) disclaimer and label it as a “Distraction” video–a video simply meant to pull you away from doing other productive tasks (e.g. see this video of a baby talking to an iPhone).
In the beginning, I wasn’t too impressed with the layout of the website but after seeing other students’ present updates on their respective news sites, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the site pages are extremely similar (e.g. Fox News, Yahoo News) in that the homepages are bombarded with headline after headline. A headline next to another headline. Headlines stacked upon one another. Headlines everywhere! However, once you divert your gaze from all that text and dig deeper through subcategories and subtopics, it’s not hard to find quality, in-depth pieces and feature articles.
Through the process of analyzing CNN.com, I also have grown to appreciate the different features they employ to showcase their most popular news stories at the moment. NewsPulse and CNN Trends are good ways for the lost and unguided reader to sort through articles and video. Both features also offer interesting ideas of what the rest of the nation is currently interested in.
While I still would prefer to go to the New York Times and the Huffington Post websites first for my daily supply of news, I still appreciate the occasional live-time CNN news alert I get on my cell phone every now and then. (Although now that I think about it, I haven’t gotten one in months….)
I won’t be following CNN.com as frequently as I have been for the past school semester, but I’m sure it’ll be following me. I’ve already watched a CNN video about Japan’s efficient transportation system today. One of my MIT friends posted it on Facebook.
Thanks for reading!
TrackCNN 