I was assigned to cover NBC News as my first beat for #loweclass, which is as daunting a task as one could imagine. NBC News is the the broadcast division for one of the biggest media conglomerations, Comcast’s NBCUniversal News Group. NBC News covers events throughout the entire world and has local news divisions throughout the entire country. To say the news outlet is broad would be a laughable understatement.
NBC News’s home page web design is obviously stellar. It features the most important news item of the day on the top with a dominant photo and a strong headline. What’s interesting to me is that NBC’s nameplate is less dominant than its feature story’s headline, which reveals to me what NBC places as its top priority. What I really like about this feature story, though, is how NBC puts it together as a package of multiple links.
For example, on NBC’s home page for today, the feature story is about President Obama’s private inaugural. Instead of having a link just to the story, NBC included a link to multiple stories, including one with fun inaugural
trivia. It also has a link to a video of Obama’s oath as well as to a slideshow of photos for the event. A dominant news package such as this keeps an interested reader on the site for a long time, which is a major plus for NBC’s
online ratings.
NBC also includes links to other top stories for the day as well as to other pages. The amount of content on the screen is somewhat overwhelming, but overall, NBC does a good job pulling its readers attention to the more
important stories. There is also a link that show’s NBC’s live twitter activity, which I think is a good interactive
concept.
Getting to NBC’s local coverage is simple. On its “Local”page, there is an interactive map which people can use to find the news closer to home. This is the most organized way of presenting the news stories.
The only negative critique I could make of the website is its use of advertising. Most of its advertisements have motion, which is distracting to the actual content. Of course, this is what the advertisers hope to accomplish,
so it is not harmful. It’s just annoying.
Overall, it’s a very clean and well developed website, as expected from a major news corporation.
NBC News’s home page web design is obviously stellar. It features the most important news item of the day on the top with a dominant photo and a strong headline. What’s interesting to me is that NBC’s nameplate is less dominant than its feature story’s headline, which reveals to me what NBC places as its top priority. What I really like about this feature story, though, is how NBC puts it together as a package of multiple links.
For example, on NBC’s home page for today, the feature story is about President Obama’s private inaugural. Instead of having a link just to the story, NBC included a link to multiple stories, including one with fun inaugural
trivia. It also has a link to a video of Obama’s oath as well as to a slideshow of photos for the event. A dominant news package such as this keeps an interested reader on the site for a long time, which is a major plus for NBC’s
online ratings.
NBC also includes links to other top stories for the day as well as to other pages. The amount of content on the screen is somewhat overwhelming, but overall, NBC does a good job pulling its readers attention to the more
important stories. There is also a link that show’s NBC’s live twitter activity, which I think is a good interactive
concept.
Getting to NBC’s local coverage is simple. On its “Local”page, there is an interactive map which people can use to find the news closer to home. This is the most organized way of presenting the news stories.
The only negative critique I could make of the website is its use of advertising. Most of its advertisements have motion, which is distracting to the actual content. Of course, this is what the advertisers hope to accomplish,
so it is not harmful. It’s just annoying.
Overall, it’s a very clean and well developed website, as expected from a major news corporation.