Foote – News Website Assignment

I chose three different websites for my assignment, which all vary widely in their purpose, but still serve a journalistic purpose.

Website 1 – MSNBC.com

MSNBC.com is the online element of the MSNBC news network. It’s partially integrated with the MSN network from Microsoft. The site has several multimedia features, including videos and slideshows. The “Participate” feature involves polls, quizzes, surveys, and a feature called “First Person” where participants could upload their own photos and videos, analogous to CNN’s iReport.

Website 2 – Kotaku

Kotaku.com is a blog concerning video game and technology news, rumors, leaks and gossip. The interactive elements are fairly standard: photo slideshows, embedded videos from both Youtube and Gametrailers.com, and commentary areas for each entry.

Website 3 – FARK.com

Fark.com is a site built almost completely on user interactivity. The site is a news aggregator, which originally started as a place where users would submit off-beat, humorous news stories from around the web. It has since expanded to include sections for sports, business, technology, entertainment, and video stories. User interactivity, aside from the act of submitting stories to the site itself, is limited to the comment section included for every entry, which has enabled a rich community to form around the site.

Of the three websites I posted, the best one to use multimedia and user interactivity to the best journalistic potential was MSNBC, but the most interesting was FARK. MSNBC provided more multimedia content, in a slick format that was easy to access. FARK, however, was the most interesting because the content was gathered by the users themselves.

~ by supernovajesus on January 24, 2008.