On November 8, there were three major news stories as shown by Google News. I’ll use that as a baseline since Google News aggregates the opinion of a large number of newspapers and is probably a good indicator of what’s considered newsworthy.

So, what we have is three major news items on this day – The Healthcare Bill passing the house floor, Hurricane Ida and related weather items, and the Fort Hood shooting. Let’s see how the major news websites reported on these at approximately the same time. I’m also providing my own opinion and commentary, but feel free to ignore those.

The New York Times decided to give the Healthcare Bill prime space on its front page with no mention of Ida or Fort Hood above the fold.

The Washington Post gave coverage to both the bill and the shooting, but a major chunk of the front page real estate was taken up by ads and articles of debatable front-page-news-worthiness.

The Wall Street Journal gave coverage to the bill and shootings with very little sensationalism and good summaries of both topics.

Fox News was more like a supermarket checkout-stand magazine with sensationalist headlines and images.

CNN was weirdly surprising. Healthcare got a couple of lines in the ‘Latest News’ segment while the attention grabbing part of the page was a video-still that seemed to be there more for the entertainment value rather than news value. Depending on when you visited the page, you would have gotten either the Fort Hood video or a video on ‘New mom inspired to lose 71 pounds’.

BBC (I chose the BBC ‘Americas’ section to be fair instead of the home page which is not America-centric) had one of the best layouts for news with good coverage for all three news items.

If I had to visit a single website other than Google News to get a good summary and news roundup, I guess I would have to visit either BBC or the WSJ.

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Posted by Anil on November 8th, 2009 :: Filed under Uncategorized

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