Lately, CNN.com has been trying really hard to drive up demand for its web-based video content delivery system… often times, to the point of sheer annoyance. There are plenty of times when perhaps I’m on my lunch break or otherwise have a little time to kill and want to check up on the news, only to find that the stories I’m interested in can ONLY be accessed by video, and there is no text version as an alternative.
Aside from the fact that CNN’s video format shuts Mac users out unless they install 3rd party video components and leaves out linux users completely, sometimes I just really would rather read some quick text on a screen to get the jist of a story. But no… news stories that get top billing on CNN are increasingly video-only, and you also have to sit through a loud, obnoxious commercial that plays for 30 seconds BEFORE you can see what the hell’s up with this stupid story. You can’t skip or fast-forward through the ads, and by the time they’re done, you end up questioning if if the story you wanted to see was REALLY worth the time you wasted. Thanks, CNN.
But the joy doesn’t stop there. Even text-based articles have accompanying video content, and sometimes, the tags they use are, well… less than enticing.
Take, for instance, this tragic story about an illegal street race in Maryland, where 7 people were killed when a car slammed into a crowd of 50 onlookers. Here’s what CNN thought would be an awesome tag to get people to click on the vid:
Oh yeah… that’s gotta be some gripping, compelling footage there. There’s no other way I’d rather spend my morning than stare at a screen of corpses in white sheets. That’s sure to win some awards!
[Note: CNN does tend to quietly “modify” their content when criticism comes to their attention, and they DO trackback blogs, so in case the content changes, here’s a screenshot of what the page originally looked like… bad taste in journalism, preserved for posterity.]
I’ve been surfing the web since Mosaic. Yeah, maybe that dates me, but believe it or not, the first news site I stumbled upon back in college, on that Sun workstation, was cnn.com. And since then, I just kept going back because they seemed to be the least sensational and least busy of the web sites. But lately, this has begun to change. Video is great and all, and my job even relies a lot on video, but if you can’t do it right, you shouldn’t be doing it at all. CNN? NOT RIGHT.
So, I think I may finally have to find another news site to get my daily general-headlines fix.
