CNN looking for love on web

NY Times:

K. C. ESTENSON, the new general manager of CNN.com, has a thought or two about most news sites on the Web: they’re predictable and homogeneous. Seen one, seen ’em all.

Even his own site, he says, could use more of a “unique signature.”

While traffic to the home page of CNN.com is higher than ever, “my hunch is that people go to it more out of habit than they do out of love,” he says. Love, in fact, is exactly what Mr. Estenson is pursuing.

Online ardor will get a test on Tuesday, with the inauguration of Barack Obama. Because millions of Americans will be at their desks for the noon-hour swearing-in, the event is expected to set new records for live Web video watching — a moment that CNN.com is well positioned to exploit.

As newspaper revenue collapses and television revenue stagnates, every media company is rushing to reformat news for the digital generation. To that end, they are placing expensive bets in the hope of answering two pointed questions: How will news organizations continue to sustain themselves? And what will the digital newsroom of the future look like?

To a greater degree than most other media companies, CNN, the cable news channel of record, has figured it out. Using page views as a metric, Nielsen ranked CNN.com as the No. 1 current events and global news Web site last year, with a monthly average of 1.7 billion — half a billion views more than its nearest competitor, MSNBC.com.

Analysts say the Web site represents the fastest-growing part of CNN’s revenue, reflecting the sharp increase in online consumption.

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The CNN web site is much better than the cable channel. It is uncluttered and fast loading and is not in continuous refresh mode like the Fox News site. It tends to have good content that is usually free of bias. While Fox has some good content, it is sometimes hard to find because of the busy layout of the page. MSNBC rarely has much original content and it too has a poor layout.

As a blogger I tend to have several Firefox tabs working at the same time and one of the more annoying things that happens is the continuous refresh. Fox News is one of the worst for this, but The Washington Post also does especially on its home page. Most of the time the content added by the refresh is so obscure that it cannot be found without effort, which means it is essentially meaningless news.

The CNN site is also blog friendly. Many times the site links comments on its stories. This synergy with blogs is beneficial to both. I would add that the NY Times and Washington Post are also blog friendly sites in that regard.

When it comes to blog hostile sites, the Washington Times may be the worst. It has a slow loading home page that is not particularly laid out well. Even its content seems to be on continuous refresh, and if you click on the stop button the page tends to go blank. The Post does this too. But one of the most insidious features of the Washington Times site is the use of embedded photos that can turn a three graph excerpt into a 20 inch post if you don't catch it and go into Edit Html mode to get rid of it. It also uses Creators Syndicate commentary, which is the most blog hostile media this side of AP.

Speaking of AP, one of the problems with the MSNBC site as well as the Yahoo news site is they tend to rely too heavily on AP. Because of the AP's blog hostility, these sites make it much harder to find the good content they may have buried under the AP stuff.

I know other conservative bloggers gripe about Google News, but I find it a very useful site. For one thing, you can search for alternative media when you happen to find an AP story with interesting content. Google also has a blog search site that is very interesting.

The bottom line is I find the current CNN site as well as the NY Times site very useful as a blogger. I hope they don't change that much in their search for love.

As for Obama's swearing in ceremony, I probably will not be that interested. I have heard enough of his speeches that they are becoming predictable, and I don't have the emotion wrapped up in the event that many on the left and in the media have. I am sure I will be more respectful of Obama than the left has been of Bush, but that speaks to my character more than to a comparison of the two men. The shabby treatment Bush has received was undeserved, but I do not choose to reciprocate.