Recent posts in my CNN Category
July 6, 2011
Behind the scenes on the CNN studio tour in Atlanta
Whilst I was in Atlanta I took the opportunity to take the Inside CNN Studio Tour, and was interested to see how an American news operation gets presented as a tourist attraction.
June 26, 2009
How major publishers are using social media to drive traffic - Part 3
This is the third of a series of posts based on a talk I gave during May 2009 at WebCertain's "International Social Media Summit" in London. You can find the first part here, and view the original presentation slides on SlideShare. The social bookmarking feedback loop The ratings you get on social bookmarking sites are valuable feedback, and some major news publishers utilise them to add value to their site. The Telegraph, for example, has a 'Most Dugg' widget...
October 22, 2008
Social media: Contextual help on 24 hour news TV websites
Yesterday I was looking at how British newspaper sites provide contextual help around the social bookmarking sites that they link to. I found that The Sun provided a very comprehensive help guide, but aside from The Independent, and some 'mouse-over tool tips' from The Guardian, nobody else did. As part of my recent social media study I also looked at a selection of 24 hour news television channels, to see if they provided bookmarking links. Today I wanted to...
September 27, 2008
Social media and TV news: Measuring social media success
Over the last week I've been publishing a series of articles looking at the social media performance of the websites belonging to some 24 hour news channels, including CNN, the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, Euronews and France 24. The results have been derived from a thirty day study I carried out in July and August 2008, taking half-hourly snapshots of Delicious, Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz to look for prominent media URLs....
September 22, 2008
Social media and TV news: Measuring CNN's success with social media
During the course of July and August I set up a project to monitor the performance of major media sites on social bookmarking and link sharing services. Every 30 minutes I took snapshots of the front pages or 'recently popular' pages of Delicious, Digg, Fark, Mixx, Newsvine, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz. I then extracted from that the popular URLs from a range of newspaper and television channel websites. You can read about the results for British newspapers in...
January 24, 2008
24/7 TV news websites: Part 12 - Search III
Over the last couple of days I've been specifically looking at the search features on the web sites offered by the Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Euronews, France 24, ITN, Russia Today and Sky News sites. Or, in the case of Euronews, not looking at them. I've put together a feature comparison chart of what I saw, but before getting to that, I wanted to look at some general trends I noticed. Search box placement is nearly uniform All of the...
January 22, 2008
24/7 TV news websites: Part 10 - Search
Having individually reviewed the websites of 8 24/7 news channels that broadcast in Europe to identify their Web 2.0 type features, I wanted to look specifically at the way they handle a very Web 1.0 piece of functionality - search. Al Jazeera Al Jazeera is the only site I looked at with a search service that does not have a search box on the homepage, or in the templates of story pages. Instead, the user has to select a text...
January 11, 2008
24/7 TV news websites: Part 4 - CNN
This week I have started a series of posts looking at the Web 2.0 features of 24/7 TV news websites. I started with the English edition of the Al Jazeera site, and the BBC News site. I'd like to finish this week's posts with a look at CNN. CNN is very proud to have been the first 24 hour news network to migrate onto the web, launching their site in August of what now seems the pre-historic era of 1995....
August 23, 2007
Reckless Records RIP - Part 7: Television Personalities
(or "Everything I know about second-hand record retail I learnt by being rude to customers at Reckless Records" by someone a bit like that bloke in 'High Fidelity') Since the beginning of last week I've been writing about my experiences working at Reckless Records in the 1990s. Right at the end of my time there I built a new website for Reckless - a pretty damn ugly melange of frames, Flash and purple as it turned out. Aside from the...
July 28, 2007
A tour of Tour De France news sites - Abandons: CNN, The Times and The Independent
Since my exposure to live coverage of the Tour De France in Greece has been restricted to occasionally popping down to a nearby bar which shows Eurosport on satellite, I've mostly been following the now drugs-tainted 2007 edition on the internet. This week I've been reviewing the sites that I have been using, and have so far looked at the official site, state and semi-state broadcasters France 24 and The BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Eurosport's online partnership with...
June 6, 2007
Twitter polluting Google search results for news topics
I've begun to see Twitter cropping up more and more in Google search engine results pages recently, and I can't help thinking that they aren't actually terribly good quality results. I noticed it particularly the other day when researching my post about the difference between the Madeleine McCann and Alex Meschisvili cases. For the search terms 'bbc news mccann', in the top three or top five results (depending on whether I was logged into Google or not) was a link...