Popular sites- strengths and weaknesses

After looking at some local Irish newspapers attempts at online journalism I feel the best way to properly judge them is to compare them to the leading international competition by examining their strengths and weaknesses. I have looked at some of the most popular news-based websites including www.nytimes.com, www.the sun.co.uk and www.guardian.co.uk and scrutinized some of the following aspects:

IntInteractivity

<!Use of external links

<!Quality of blogs

UsUse of video

New York Times

When investigating interactivity on this website I looked at the main story on the homepage to see if the opportunity arose to make a reader comment and it does on the left hand side of the page. The ease by which you could do this greatly impressed me. On the home page they have also included an educational video of Radovan Karadzic which detailed the aspects of his crimes however all the links were internal which shows me an unwillingness to let the viewers leave their site. The blogs section included numerous and diverse sections. I have looked at some of these before and they tend to be well-written and researched.

The Sun

The Sun’s website differs greatly from the New York Times and the Guardian with numerous questionable aspects in relation to their online news output. To be honest I couldn’t properly critique this site as it contained no external links or blogs however there was a lot of videos and a discussion section.

The Guardian

The Guardian’s site was very easy to browse and contained easy links to navigate through various topics. It was also relatively easy to leave comments on their blogs however like the other websites dealt with it didn’t offer the browser any external hypertextuality with no links to related news sites and articles