New CNN Site Brings Video, Oprah, and Facebook to News Junkies
Since it first launched in 1995, CNN's Web site has always delivered a broad variety of news to a broad audience. The site's design -- generally jam-packed with dozens of headlines that might be catnip to news junkies, but can be overwhelming to more casual browsers -- has generally reflected that content stream. On Monday, however, CNN.com will launch a new design (its first since 2007) that incorporates a roomier, less crowded look with a bigger emphasis on pictures, video, citizen journalism, social networking, entertainment, and pop culture. Last night, CNN general manager KC Estenson gave reporters an early look at the new site.
The biggest change is the overall look of the site. CNN.com's current home page features a main story with a big picture and then a bunch of different sections with text-based story links (some videos offer thumbnail pictures to break up all that text, but not much). The new design places a big playable video right at the top and a second big picture to the left that links to a citizen-journalist 'iReport.' Below that is a set of clickable pictures and videos leading to stories underneath. Yes, there are still plenty of headlines, but the revamped site generally offers a greater balance between images and text than the current one, making for a pleasing browsing experience.
Users are also able to customize some of what they see on CNN.com's main page, like weather, local headlines, or stock quotes -- that's not too different from what a lot of portals like Google, Yahoo and [our parent company] AOL are doing, but an innovative twist on the news portal customization concept is the 'NewsPulse' page, which runs literally all of CNN's news stories in every section and lets you filter and organize them by author, date published, keywords, popularity, and more. Estenson called it "an iTunes for News." It's a cool comparison, but we'll have to see how quickly it actually scrolls when the site launches on Monday.
CNN is adding plenty of other features and content that will bring a less stuffy old media and more Web-street-wise feel to the whole site, including new 'Opinion' columnists like Pete Cashmore (great last name), the founder of social-networking news blog Mashable.com, and conservative journalist David Frum of NewMajority.com. Opinions will also feature opinionated comedians and actors like The View's Joy Behar who also has a new show on CNN) and John Leguizamo.
During last November's presidential election, CNN's live online video webcast was paired with a live version of Facebook Connect, which enabled users to comment on their Facebook pages in real time without ever leaving the Webcast page. The experiment was so successful -- 27-million video views -- that CNN repeated the pairing for the Webcast during Michael Jackson's memorial last summer. Now, on November 9 at 9pm Eastern Standard Time, the site will pick a non-newsy event that may well end up as news itself, when it pairs Facebook Connect with a live Webcast version of Oprah's Book Club. Users can pose questions and make comments on their Facebook pages without ever taking their eyes off Oprah's tome talk (about Uwem Akpan's 'Say You're One of Them,' in this case). It's kind of like AOL Chat rooms all over again, except more of your friends will probably see what you have to say! (Once again, disclaimer: AOL owns and operates Switched.)
Other tech-leaning additions include TED Talk Tuesdays, a weekly video installment of interviews (with luminaries like Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson and Isabel Allende) from the eponymous bi-annual tech, entertainment and design conference; two first-person Web-only documentary shows shot entirely on Flip Video cameras ('Americans in Afghanistan,' an off-the-beaten track series about Afghanistan and 'The Handsome Furs Tour,' a video diary of the Pitchfork.com-darling-indie-band's Asian tour), and the full integration of iReport (CNN's citizen journalism stories, which are submitted by citizen journalists around the world and vetted by CNN editors before going live) into the main site. It may be just a fledgling start (and contains some content that's already available at the TED site itself), but Web-friendly elements such as these are still a surprisingly rare mix of the new media old guard (TED) and latest tech trends (citizen journalism and Flip video docs by music-blog-endorsed bands) in one place.
If you haven't noticed, we do a lot of linking to CNN here at Switched, so we're going to visit the site no matter how it looks, because it has stories we want to read and pass on to our readers. That said, there's always been something kind of drab and mainstream about the way that news has been delivered online and on TV, in our opinion. Not to mention the sheer number of headlines on the current site now. The redesign is overall a roomier, less jam-packed breath of fresh air that makes us want to watch video on our computers (and, increasingly, our televisions). Plus, it's just a whole lot sexier, possibly even the most appealing and slick looking mainstream news site out there (at least for now). Now, who's next to bring sexy back to news? (Come on, no-sex-please, we're BBC.com, let's revamp that site!)
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