Tuesday, January 23, 2007

NEWS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

CNN.COM is most favorite website I visist on a daily basis for the local and international news I need. I am very keen on knowing what happens around me,this explains why a day never passes bye without taking at least a peak at the website of the new giant in the world.

As soon as you enter into the website of cnn you are right away introduced to a wide variety of interests you can explore be it verifying a news item you have heard or rendering yourself to be informed on what you need to know for the day,week, or even a month and year if you do not mind going into the archives.

It certainly gives a clear introduction to all the items you want to look at.For example severy weather in denver or more soldiers die in Iraq will give you the gist to what you are about to read and certainly it depends on whether you went to the local or international weather section or local and world news sections.

This adheres to web based media convenitions in more ways than one in that it gives you the salient news at first glance by the catchy titles. These titles summarise the news events while providing links for details if desired by the reader.

Images provide a vivid support for the titles as it helps to paint the picture of the image being portrayed in the writing,using images to support writing takes a different toll on your understanding because it makes the story more concrete for communitaction is more effective.
Perhaps the most vivid convention of all websites of this ganre such as bbc is that it provides continuity of flow from one item to the other in a very chronological form. It is the United States then the most concentrated news area in the world namely the middle east,then all the rest of the world such as Asia,Africa,Europe and South America.
The difference between traditional news writing such as newspaper or media such as radio and television is that they follow a coherent chart of putting across the new items. For example in reading the denver post you have to keep going through a write up to get to the end whereas reading on the internet or blog you get to see the end of the write up before even starting to read it. It gives you what you expect and it is right there at your finger tips.
You get the chance to read with the end in site because everything is laid before you from the beginning and development of local news to the ongoing flow of events or breaking news.
It is interesting to note that the cnn website provides links to videos of news cast that the visitor to the site can click to watch if he or she does not care to read. In this sense it is no different from regular television broadcast except that the viewer can pause, fastfoward repeat or stop on the website.
The computer editing abilities gives a writer the chance to back into the articles already posted to make changes if necesary which is not the case for print media. Once the paper is printed the best excuse that can be assigned to something as simple as spelling mistake is printing error whereas a blog can be corrected over and over again as needed.

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