CNN Internet Reporting is Useless
There is a pretty popular video featuring a staged wedding intro dance at a church in Minnesota. When I saw the video a week ago I think the view count was somewhere near the million mark(?) and as of today it is has passed 13 million views! Almost every news outlet has picked up the story considering the story is quite simple: a fun dance at a wedding featured on Youtube.
I saw this CNN link about the video via the blogosphere. From the article (emphasise mine):
"The joyous video of the group busting their loosely choreographed moves down the aisle went viral after the newlyweds posted it on YouTube."
The only problem is that the link to the Youtube video is not anywhere on the page from CNN. Don't you think it would be nice? The internet as a medium is meaningless without linking to content. This isn't a newspaper. Obviously the first thing any reader will want to do is see the video.
It seems incredibly out of date to report news about a website, a post or internet sensation without actually linking to it. I agree there are many things I don't want to see (violent images for example), but reporting on anything that is "viral" is naturally going to increase its popularity. Unfortunately this issue is not limited to funny videos. There are plenty of useful websites that news sites like CNN discuss at lengths (Wikipedia anyone?) but intentionally refuse to provide any links. In the least, it makes sense to place a link to the content at the end of the article so people can see it after reading (MSBNC for example). The effect of sites like CNN will make me completely disregard the news piece and just google for it myself.
No, I don't really visit CNN anymore. When they figure out how to use the internet, someone please let me know.
2 Comments:
Mahesh on August 1, 2009 ~ 09:21 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbr2ao86ww0
old media is dead… long live new media…Jeff Schiller on August 4, 2009 ~ 01:01 AM
Thanks - that was a great video. I agree, old media still doesn't get it.
Jeff