AOL News relaunches as a blog
Cory Bergman June 26th, 2007
You may remember that TMZ.com — an AOL property — has had tremendous success switching from a traditional news format to a blog format, and now the new AOL News is following in its footsteps. Think of it as a modified blog format, with a shorter home page and stories not necessarily listed in pure chronological order. But it has comments, tags and user recommendations. (The version that’s in beta right now does not have all the functionality that’s displayed on the tour page. Looks like there are some bugs to work out.) So what do you think? Should more news sites switch to a blog format?
7 Comments Add your own
1. Michael Gay | June 26th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I’ll be very interested to watch this. I’m a huge fan of using a blog format to cover breaking news, but that’s when it’s focused on one topic. It will be interesting to see how this site feels when there is a death story followed by a health story followed by a skateboarding dog.
2. Michael Gay | June 26th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Already the site is breaking the idea of a blog by ranking things in a different order than they were posted. The first two Paris stories are not in the order of most recent. Right now the top post is Paris getting out of jail, and it says it was posted 16 min ago (even though she was released about 16 hours ago). It would be understandable if it were an updated story, but nothing in the headline, image or short text are new.
3. liz | June 26th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
funny, i was looking at this model a year ago at my old job, but backed away… i still think this is the future of news site front pages, plus 1 or 2 slots of editor-chosen features at the tippy top so the big news stories of the day don’t get buried.
i’m also a huge fan of ranking-type organization like digg and think it’s a good way to go for sites who have enough traffic to support such a front page design.
4. invitedmedia | June 26th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
hey, that ’skateboarding dog’ was really something to see.
darn thing gets to do it in hawaii too!
i’m left to ponder why the gals in the ‘burgh did not use it on their daily web-only.
5. Charles | June 26th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
I think the blog format is a great way to go. (In fact, if I had more time and more income, I’d launch a full-time dedicated news blog.) One of the best models, pre-AOL News, is USAToday’s “On Deadline”. It’ll be interesting to see if this, plus ABCNews, helps to make the news more “interactive” for regular folks.
6. David Johnson | June 27th, 2007 at 9:08 am
i’ve said it before, so why not say it again? do both. if you are running a tv website, why don’t you just vblog yourself? you could even launch it under separate cover, but try putting your content into the format… and i mean putting the packages in only. don’t hack up your newscast and post one-minute clips of anchors behind desks reading headlines and no back-and-forth set ups. drop the standard broadcast elements that you have to use on air to provide context and use the text in the post to get that done so you can focus on video that shows something happening.
7. George | January 2nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
This is a really neat article. I enjoyed reading it and learned a few things.
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed