I mean, I can see putting a travel section on a news website if you were going to give information about travel destinations, news there, and precautions (like: don’t travel to Samoa this week as you might get cholera), but CNN’s travel section does none of this. It’s almost as annoying as when they had a whole tab related to Anna Nicole Smith.

To give CNN a bit of credit, there are a few news stories, like an old hotel reopening and what that could do to the area, but these are few and far between.

Well… at least there’s nothing on there about girls gone wild on spring break – although maybe it was up before I noticed the travel section and has since gone the way of old news.

Cat vs. PetSpa

Practically every paragraph has a link at the end of it to another story, a video clip, and interview, photos, timelines… and the list goes on. Obviously they’ve been working on these elements for at least several days (if not weeks) but they did a great job in bringing it all together now that the story has some closure.

I also really liked the way they framed the story as a news story and not a human interest story. On almost every television news show the first thing you’d see on this story is the soldiers stepping off the plane and kissing their loved ones all teary-eyed and heartwarmingly. Personally, that stuff just makes me uncomfortable.

But CNN doesn’t do that, it uses print to tell the story and the heartwarming video is simply an add-on, which people who like that kind of thing can watch.

It works both ways, too, because there are many people who wouldn’t care at all about a timeline or the more mathmatical charts and graphs, and CNN leaves those as links as well. In addition, even the links themselves have interactive elements, which I think is really cool.

The main focus of this part of the study was on the audience, advertizing, public attitudes, and, most importantly, the whole “business” of online news.

First off, the study found that while the audience itself hasn’t changed much in the past year, the way people are using their time online has. For instance, people spend more time than ever online, yet the amount of time spent on news sites seems to not have grown. The report believes, and I agree with this, that the incongruity here is because of the popularity of news aggregators and blogs. They also found that more people visiting news sites are “incidental online news customers” or people who went online for some reason other than news but found their way to news sites. This leads me to think that perhaps news sites should advertise on non-news sites to bring in more customers.

This is particularly important because we need to be able to bring more customers to the sites and keep them there longer in order for advertisers to trust the lucrativeness of advertising on news sites. The problem is that people look at news online very differently from how they look at it in a newspaper, on the radio, or on television. Online users tend to skip around and scan sites instead of sitting down to read an entire article or even page. It’s also much easier for them to ignore advertisements because with the navigation and personalization tools now available on news sites, it’s much more difficult to force a user to watch a commercial or read a printed advertisement.

It’s this interactivity, however, which online news providers are hoping will help boost their plateaued readership. Industry analysts are calling this “the year of Web 2.0,” meaning that people are now able to have conversations about the news on the news sites and even create their own blogs and comment on other peoples’. Most news agencies have caught on to this by advertising blogs, asking for comments, and even publishing user-submitted materials (like the CNN.com’s “I-Reports” section, where the content is all user-generated).

Obviously adding “citizen journalists” into online news has changed the face of news companies and who they employ, but even the professional employees have changed. Obviously these sites need IT people to simply work on formatting and data problems, but the essence of what a journalist has to be able to do is changing as well. I we just put up a newspaper verbatum on a website, it would be defeating the purpose of the interactivity of the internet. Therefore, reporters are now required to learn how to embed video, add hyperlinks and create interactive features related to the stories they write. I think this is going to make it easier for the next generation of journalists to get an “in” because we are being trained how to do this in our classes and will have been trying to figure how to make online news lucrative from the start.

Okay, so the stories under this must be the most important ones of the day (at least in CNN’s mind… I personally don’t find peoples’ responses to Disney’s new princess as pressing as “house panel defies Bush, votes for subpoenas“). But other than the order they are put in on the list, there’s nothing to tell the reader which stories really are important.

The problem with just putting them in order of importance is that web viewers scan sites, meaning they rarely go down a list in order. For instance, when I first look at the site, my eye is drawn first to a story about a cute polar bear (because I love cute polar bears). However, this does not mean that the cute polar bear has any news relevance, particularly the same relevance as the House voting down Bush’s proposal to not force sworn testimony on witnesses for the fired attorneys case.

And despite my love for cute polar bears, THIS PISSES ME OFF. It’s high time CNN got its act together and made the real headlines easier to distinguish. How about color coding them? If they simply made the headlines about politics blue and the headlines about sports green, then the user could visually tell which ones have more or less relevance to them.

Or better yet, just move the adorable animals and disney princesses off to another section which… well, already exists; it’s called the “most popular” stories. And as we all know, just because something’s popular, that doesn’t mean it has to be any good.

First of all, it’s considered a top story even though it’s a feature on a country that, well, most American’s could care less about. But India really is very important to American trade, diplomacy, and the future of the world.

Not only does CNN do a noble deed by bringing a knowledge of this important country (mostly why it should be important to us) to the average American (or, at least, those that go to CNN.com for news), but it also shows these average people the duality of life in India, which, if one accepts to look close enough, can also be seen here in the United States.

I really like the way the video jumps from the priviliged view of India’s future to the impoverished view – particularly since it looks at the generation that’s just about to enter the workforce (or already has at an early age) couples the great opportunities afforded to some kids and the unfortunate fates of the rest.

Using the point of view of people from the same age group to show how much the divided economy changes the bright-eyed optimism of young adults when poverty hits them is a perfect way to demonstrate these extremes.

Good job, CNN!

It’s pretty obvious to anyone visiting the site that there is a conservative bias. Perhaps one would expect the blog to skew things – I’d bet they were all over John Kerry around the same time for being such a “pansy” in Vietnam. But regardless of the way they felt about the forged documents, they brought out the truth and used fact to back that up (an unfortunately rare occurrence on most blogs).

This brings to point the major “difference” people see between blogs and journalism. A blog is coming from someone’s point of view and journalists are supposed to keep their point of view out of the picture. However, this line between bloggers and journalists is evanescing. In this example, Dan Rather let his expectation that George Bush would have tried to get out of serving the military allow him to overlook the finer points of the data he was given. It just goes to show that even the most seasoned of journalists can be mislead by their own opinions.It isn’t important how object the journalist is naturally; what’s important is how much exertion the can force upon trying to be objective.

Most newspapers at the very least claim a high level of objectivity. While one might argue this is untrue, it’s important to note that even the very liberal Boston Globe reported on the scandal surrounding the Dan Rather broadcast and eventually got it right (thought they were much more apt to jump at it when it made Bush look bad). What a paper really needs to do to gain reader confidence is to report all the news and present all the facts, even ones they don’t like. Blogs, on the other hand, tend to ignore the facts they don’t like. This is because there is no editor breathing down their back, no stockholders to complain, and, most importantly, their readers don’t go to them to tell them all the information. The point in blogs is to find the scoop that the papers have, purposely or not, missed, not to get the day’s news. Of course, some people think they’re getting the full news on blogs, but the general public knows that blogs are biased and relatively linear as far as story scope.

Even though Power Line acted in a much more journalistic manner than Dan Rather, blogs still should not be given exactly the same level of accountability as the press. A blog is where people go out to get the stories you can’t get anywhere else, be they true or false. The important part, however, is that sometimes these rumors are substantiated and need to be heard – especially if the press has missed out on it; you could even call bloggers the watchdogs of the press just as the press are the watchdogs of politics.

1 – Objectivity – This one’s obvious. How can you report the truth if you’re too stubborn to see it?

2 - Empathy – As much as we are all great at hating our enemies (what can I say, it comes naturally), I feel empathy is particularly important when reporting to retain objectivity. If we can try to figure out how our subjects are thinking and why, we can gain a deeper understanding of their actions, regardless of whether we’d do things the same way or not.

3 – Stubbornness - You simply can’t take no for an answer to get the really important information. Most stories could damage a person’s reputation, put them in danger, or simply scare them and therefore they probably aren’t going to say much unless you eek it out of them (see: Watergate). This isn’t to say we should hound people ruthlessly – as in everything, using one’s common sense here is key.

4 – Monitor of the World – It’s our job to not miss a beat when reporting the truth and to make sure our politicians and organizations are doing the right thing (and feel pressured to do so as well).

5 – Informant – I don’t mean this in the negative sense, but in that we must help people know what’s important and make opinions about situations. This is particularly true during elections – who would really go out of their way to dig up information about people running for School Board or their town’s waste management? More importantly, where would we be if no one knew anything about our presidential candidates?

6 – Weigher of Facts – This one’s tricky, because we don’t want to be telling people how to think. However, the editorial department of most newspapers is very important. Here’s a classic example of what NOT to do: “Some people say the world is flat. Some people say the world is round. Back to you, Bob.” What we need to do is say some people may think each is true, but that there is sound scientific research that proves the world is round, which we’ve researched and decided is true.

2 – Metroblogging Boston – I’m always looking for things to do in my spare time and it’s deceptively hard to find the cool little things in the city (like new bands). This person seems to know a lot about what’s happening around town in the more underground scenes, which I love.

3 – Around the World in 80 Days – I like this blog over most news blogs because I don’t have to just “trust” that this person’s opinion is valid – instead they just link you to a bunch of interesting stories that you don’t normally see in mainstream American media. Therefore it’s real journalists writing, and the blog is more of an “interesting news aggregator.”

2 – Reverse Chronological Order – Jason Calcanis gives this as an example of most blogs in the Online Journalism Review’s “Just what is a blog, anyways?” This is something I’d never really thought of, but most blogging sites, wordpress.com included, don’t even give an option for the order your entries show up. It’s just a working tally of the author’s thoughts and ideas, and each entry shows up at the top to show that it’s new.

3 – Calcanis also says blogs usually have a Comments Option. The whole point in blogs is to start a conversation, regardless of the topic and by putting it up on the web, anyone can comment and anyone can read these comments, too.

4 – Informal Tone – the OJR’s article on blogs reminds us that one thing common to most blogs is an informal, non-”newsy” tone. People tend to just get information out in a very everyday fashion, be it about Scooter Libby or the greal lunch they just had.

5 – No Editor – Blogs are personal and, as Calcanis again reminds us, are no longer “blogs” if they are edited by an outside source. The author may change something they’ve said, but this is rare, and in the end they at least should have total control.