I have a kneejerk reaction when I hear words like "infotainment," and that reaction is disgust. The idea that I, or any other intelligent viewer, need to have my news couched in flashy videos or content worthy of TMZ is insulting. I have no problem with going to CNN.com and seeing Jon Hamm's beautiful Don Draper mug front and center, but for the lead story to be "'Mad' about period detail" is a little surprising. This is CNN, where I go to feel informed, educated and high and mighty, so I expect the News, capital N.
But frankly, it looks great. As the Guardian article rightly points out CNN is going back where it came from: TV. All the news content is still there, but the great work CNN does with "rich content" - video news stories saturated with information in an easily digestible format - adds a new layer of interest to the site. The clean layout of the new homepage makes it all easily accessible.
In addition, the Guardian mentions what is perhaps the coolest feature of the new and improved cnn.com: customizable content. "New personalisation functionality enables users to customise a column on the front with sports scores or stock prices, local headlines or weather," and that is pretty effin sweet.
CNN.com seems to have found its niche in the world of the 24 hour news cycle, an amalgam of hard and soft news, text-based and visual storytelling. It can leave the heavy writing to the online newspapers. They need the work anyway.
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Customized content is the future, but I don't understand why I should ever have to set anything up. It seems like it would be fairly easy for a website to track my clicks, spot my cookies, and determine my interests. The website could then interact with my dis/likes and display the things I have established an interest in. This would further my association with the website as I fine tune my front page by paging through content. The site could even incorporate a Pandora-like feature where I tell them I am not interested in a particular story so they screen out similar stories. In this way I could eventually go to CNN.com and get more cute animal stories and less politics. /rant
ReplyDeleteMatt, do you think the machines and programming should handle our preferences and proclivities? Perhaps this is the rural southerner, humanities-driven guy in me but it seems an erosion of free will that I'm kind of weirded out by. Yes, call me a luddite, perhaps. But I don't mind constantly refining and redefining my preferences. I worry that algorithms and cookies may lead me to exist in an echo chamber.
ReplyDeleteOn an unrelated note, I totally enjoyed that Mad Men piece, Gemma, but wish it had been Christina Hendricks' mug starting at me. Matt, if CNN can do that, I may give in.
Like Matt, I also would like to be tracked by more websites and have them automatically customized to my personal settings when I visit them. This is the future of the internet.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, this may lead to a further fragmenting of society as people only see what they want to see and never expand outside their own tiny little infotainment bubbles.
Also, CNN's move to entertainment is business driven. Not only do more people already traffic there, but MSNBC and FOX News have become the sources of cable news for most Americans, with CNN lagging in third. Maybe CNN needs to give people something other than partisan bloviating to compete. n peepelz wil alwayz lik da kittehz!!