Online News

I have chosen to critique and analyse new.com.au and crikey.com.au. First I will start with news.com.au.

The news.com.au website is an Australian wide website, which gives links to all Australian newspapers. The website allows people to go to the one website and gather information from any newspaper and have the most newsworthy stories of the day in the one place. The stories are broken down into set headings, with by-lines and pictures creating hyperlinks for the reader to gather more information about the story if they wish to, or simply scroll over. The website also has easy tabs to areas such as entertainment, sport and world news. Once someone has found their story of interest, news.com.au also provides relating stories from past and present issues. The website also provides customisation options, so the user can drag areas of interest into readily available viewing. In a time-poor society, time saving features are important and very valued by users (Salwen, Garrison & Driscoll 2005).

As a convergence of technology of most new media, news.com.au has multiple functions for their stories, such as podcasts, downloads and image galleries, allowing the users different functions of accessing news, especially in areas of interest. The website has interactive features, like Twitter, Facebook and blogging, allowing users to partake in citizen journalism, which is becoming increasingly popular due to technology trends (Reich 2008). News.com.au also features the most popular stories of the day for quick access. The website is constantly updating the headlining stories and photographs, to keep up with the massive news influx from around Australia and all newspapers. A negative aspect of this website, like most news mediums, is a heavy presence of advertising and commercial news.

Crikey.com.au is an alternative news website with a subscription based audience. One of the most obvious differences when contrasted to news.com.au is the lack of entertainment and sensationalist news. Crikey.com.au engages its target audience by presenting stories of non-commercial news value, such as politics (Picard 2004). Crikey’s website is easy to navigate and has noticeably less advertising than most news websites. Crikey also uses humour about topical stories to engage viewers further. Crikey.com.au, like news.com.au uses headings, by-lines and pictures as hyperlinks, allowing the user to expand the stories of their interest. Like most news websites, Crikey also uses social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogging for audiences to interact and communicate with each other or simply voice their opinion (Dimmick, Chen & Li 2004).

Crikey, have video and column tabs, and easy tabs for navigating to areas such as politics, environment and culture. These easy tabs allow readers to act in a non-passive and interactive way, allowing them to read, search and view news only of interest (Hirst & Harrison 2007). As mentioned before, these features are adamant for usability, due to an increasingly time-poor audience. Technology trends mean that people have an immediate and constant flow of news, and online news websites must be able to keep up with these trends to engage their target audience (Reich 2008). Crikey, being an alternative and non-commercial news outlet, engage their audience excellently and their website reflects this.

References:

Dimmick, J, Chen Y & Li, Z 2004, ‘Competition between the internet and traditional news media’, Journal of Media Economics, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 19-33.

Hirst, M & Harrison, J 2007, Communication and new media: from broadcast to narrowcast, Oxford, Victoria.

Michael Brian Salwen, M, Garrison, B & Driscoll, P 2005, Online news and the public, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey.

Picard, R 2004, ‘Commercial and newspaper quality’, Newspaper journal research, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 54-65.

Reich, Z 2008, ‘How citizens create news stories’, Journalism Studies, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 739-758.