WKRN switches to WorldNow
Michael Gay March 18th, 2008
You’ll remember WKRN.com offered many features that were innovative when they launched. The site has now relaunched as a WorldNow site.
Adds Cory: They also recently relaunched NashvilleisTalking, ditching the blog and turning it into a user-generated blog aggregator. Nashville blogs, by and large, are giving it a big thumbs-down. “What the heck is going on with Nashville is Talking?” blogs one. “It’s flooding my RSS feed with stuff and I look over there and it looks good, but there are just words, words, words and I can’t make heads nor tails of them. It’s like a handsome, drunken Frankenstein’s monster.” That’s what happens when you shift from an editorial-aggregation model to a pure user-generated aggregator. I’d write a little more about the relaunch, but the site is down right now.
Screen grab of the new WKRN.com…
15 Comments Add your own
1. Allen | March 18th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Wow. Now THAT’S an ugly site.
2. Anonymous | March 18th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Eww.
Have we not yet realized as an industry that full flash interfaces are horrible?
3. Anony Mouse | March 18th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Well, that just shows you that Young Broadcasting does not care about the Internet.
4. tdc | March 19th, 2008 at 6:43 am
hey, i’m still laughing that young (symbol: YBTVA) accounted for (and evidently got the accountants to sign off on) KRON as a ‘discontinued operation’ in their last quarterly earnings release.
5. tdc | March 19th, 2008 at 7:10 am
spoke too soon about wkrndotcom, though; what’s wrong with it?
i suggest you clickon it and then clickover to cnndotcom… see any similarities????
6. Ed | March 19th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I’m curious to hear the analysis here.
Why did they switch to a “platform”? What did they see in the platform that they were unable to fulfill themselves?
Do they consider it a step forward, or a necessary step backwards, forced by other business requirements?
7. tdc | March 19th, 2008 at 9:05 am
can’t help you there, ed.
but if anyone wants to read a paranoid piece hurry and click onlinemediadaily’s blurb in lr’s the news wire.
brand publishers: google ad manager to your own demise.
laughing out loud is quite alright.
8. wtf NIT? | March 19th, 2008 at 9:50 am
The new Nashville Is Talking site is hideous.
Don’t know who is pulling the internet strings @ KRN now …wow.
9. anonymous | March 19th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Our Web site switched over to Internet Broadcasting from WorldNow last year, and thank God we did. WorldNow is horrible. The poor folks over at WKRN is now finding out the hard way. The site looks HORRIBLE!! They are not getting their money’s worth AT ALL.
10. anonymous | March 19th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
They were on WN when the site first launched in 2000.
11. Rob | March 19th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Wasn’t WKRN.com the poster child for innovation at last year’s NAB conference?
12. "John Galt" | March 20th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Rob…Innovation left the KRN building with Mike Sechrist.
13. anonymous | March 20th, 2008 at 11:17 am
Innovation left before Mike Sechrist. It left when the numbers and ratings from their experiment tanked.
14. Anonymous | March 24th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
It’s interesting to see a news organization switch to WorldNow considering their latency with keeping up with newer web standards and over abundance of flash use in the ever growing AJAX world.
I work in a market that isn’t the largest (about 400k people), and one of the competition stations in the market just (unofficially) decided to cancel their contract with WN and go completely in house because of their (unconfirmed) $80k+ per year licensing fees they were paying.
The ironic part is that the ABC affiliate and NBC affiliate (the one that is switching) both have WN currently and their sites are almost identical because of it; both crap.
Why would any media company switch to World Now?! On top of everything else, they need to hire some decent front end developers.
15. Christian | April 9th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
As someone that works in web here at WKRN, I’m curious if Michael or anyone can list a couple of the features on the old WKRN that were “innovative?” I can’t think of one. Help me out, fellas.
With respect to Cory’s claim that the relaunch of NashvilleIsTalking.com ditched the blog and turned it into a user-generated blog aggregator, this is simply inaccurate reporting. NIT is still a blog and has way more features than any Movabletype or WordPress blog out there, including NIT 1.0. I blog there everyday.
Nashville bloggers aren’t giving the site two thumbs down. I can find at least one quote that says LostRemote sucks and post it on a blog, too, but that would just make me look like an idiot because readers and the community here know better.
For those asking why we went to WorldNow, have you tried using our old site over the past two years? As bad as WorldNow is, it’s 10 times better than what we had.
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