The two articles I am comparing are about former Vice President Dick Cheney's latest heart attack, suffered on Monday. One article is from cnn.com, the other from foxnews.com
In short, I thought the CNN article was better overall. The CNN story had two videos and a photo, while the Fox article only had a photo of Cheney. The CNN videos also enlarged when you pushed the play button and opened on the same page you are already on, so new windows and tabs were not opening unnecessarily. This helped provide a good integration of the videos. Then when the videos were stopped, they shrunk back to the smaller size and moved out of the way. This does not automatically make the CNN article better, though, as one of the videos was pretty useless. It simply rehashed, and in some places had older information than, what the article had. One CNN video focused on Cheney's medical history and brought in CNN's medical correspondent, and that provided some insights onto what care Cheney was probably receiving at the hospital.
As for the text of the article, I also preferred the CNN article, especially when it comes to the sources that were used. The Fox article relied on family members and friends of the family for information, and only used the response from Cheney's office once, and not in the lead. The CNN article used information from that statement in its lead, using a more reliable source than his family, which Fox used.
Another small part of the CNN article that I like is the story outline. CNN now uses it in just about every article on the Web site, and it is a small bullet-point list of facts. This is placed near the top of the story and is called "Story Highlights." This gives 3 or 4 facts that offer a good outline of the story so one can get the basics of the story in just a few moments. It is great for the Web, and it can give a little more detail than just reading the lead would, but is much faster than reading or even skimming the entire article.
19 hours ago
No comments:
Post a Comment