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This Just In

"17 hours ago"
--The Harvard Crimson

Much about the Harvard Crimson website impressed me, but the mentioning of how old (or new) each story is that I reference in the above quote was the most audacious and cool thing about the website to me. I suspect the people working on the website have gone home for Thanskgiving, since the most recent story is from 17 hours ago, but still, the basic organization is helpful. Most people visiting this site are probably most interested in the most recent stories, seeing how the website is supposed to giving us "news" and not "olds." It's pretty impressive because it implies the website is updated regularly enough to have stories from a few hours ago bury stories from a couple days ago. However, the stories aren't exactly arranged just by level of recentness. For example, a few stories in the magazine section are from "10 days ago" but are given more prominent placement than the stories under "More News" that are from "Yesterday" or "2 days ago." I wonder why they arranged it that way; perhaps they wanted to display the variety of content they have, so they put the less-frequently-updated magazine stories above the news stories deemed less important than the top stories. That's understandable, but I think the fact that they call so much attention to when the stories were posted makes it seem like all the stories should be organized according to how recent they are. That's one of the drawbacks of this website--it bombards you with so much information that it's kind of hard to sort out. The information is clearly organized--I like all the categories they have at the top, even the potentially confusing "Flyby" because it made me want to click on it to find out what it was. As for the rest of the website, however, I didn't know what to click because there was so much going on. The pictures especially caught my attention and then made me lose focus because of how fast they went by. In order for people to be able to read the captions in their entirety, the pictures need to change just a few seconds more slowly.
But overall, the website is very organized and eye-catching. Some of the headlines--"Sex and the Sprinter" and "The WTF Era Begins," especially--really grab your attention with their boldness. Courtney A. Fiske's opinion column is called "The F-Word," which I think is pretty bold and brassy. I can picture some professional newspapers that might not want to take those kind of risks. The only place where I think the boldness of the website gets into trouble is in keeping the website concise. If they trimmed down the amount of information on the page, it would be easier to follow while still remaining busy and active enough to get people's attention.

Link back to course website

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on November 25, 2009 7:47 PM.

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