ICFJ Assignment#1

All right, finally getting around to posting a blog. I visited all the websites because I'm curious to see what is being done in the "industry." I work for a small town newspaper, circ. 18,000, and the overriding emphasis is on the online production these days, the newspaper is secondary. So, with all the emphasis on the website I am always looking to see what other websites are doing to bring additional viewers & readers to their sites.
So, lets talk about the websites:

Alarabiya.net: My initial impression was that this was an objective news site with an emphasis on hard news. The lead story was about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas criticizing the EU's decision on Jerusalem being a two-state capital. But beyond that story the rest of the website became a series of one-sided opinion pieces or stories with single sources, weak reporting and reading more as one-sided public relations by government censors. As a photojournalist I took notice of many file photos that really had no relationship to the stories they were used to illustrate. In fact I noticed comments on one side about Saudi women at a shopping mall being harassed that even the readers comments were critical of the photograph's non-relevance to the story and one reader's comment was to chastise Alarabiya for over use of this photo, that he had seen it used to illustrate a number of previous stories. When a website or a newspaper is too lax or lazy to make the attempt to cover the very news it is "reporting" on then it loses credibility with me. I feel the same way about using photo-illustrations for stories. I know that with some some stories you just aren't able to photograph the situation but with a story about Egyptian men complaining about divorce laws with a photo illustration it is another example of loss of credibilty. There are unattributed quotes in the story that one has to assume come from the main source, it's sloppy reporting and bad editing. Perhaps the story was lost in translation. When you go to the bottom home page of the website to read "about us" the description there is nothing about who the people are behind the website, who funds the website, who works at the website, who is the management of the website, there is a lot of information on what awards they have won and a lot of self-congratulations regarding how great the website is.
I guess the one asset I appreciated from the website was the number of story ideas I gleaned from the website.

Gawker: Right from the start, from the very minute I saw the home page I had no faith in the objectiveness of the reporting. The stories seemed to have a condescending, snarkiness to them, definite attitude in the reporting and very subjective. Even the Gawker title seems to telepathically send a message of non-seriousness. The design, relying on a series of thumbnail photos of celebrities tells me that this is a website devoted to infotainment, yes it's information, but of a most specious and irrelevant need to know brand. Gawker is more of an in-house hipster rag, being cool and teeming with irony and that sense of superiority. Gawker is not competing with the New York Times or the Washington Post. I get the feeling that Gawker is trying to be the anti-newspaper website. On the left column is a solicitation to "tip your editors." All newspapers rely on tips from their readers, so many stories come to us that way but the very tone and use of the word "tips." Tips sounds more like briefs or gossip, they're not asking their readers for story ideas but to send in your tips. There is a non-seriousness that permeates the website and the editors lamentably fulfill that non-seriousness.

MinnPost: This site really threw me off, first the home page design is so busy that it's tough to track stories and the first story I read was a sympathetic Q&A profile on conservative congress woman Michelle Bachman by a conservative journalist Michael Bonafeld. I quickly assumed that the website was a branch of Human Events but then when I went to read the "about us" I discovered the background of the people funding the site and the career backgrounds of the management involved with the daily operations of the site and I had to reverse my initial impression. I found many of the stories to have multiple sources and the reporting was on a first tier professionally, however some of the stories had a subjective slant that should be avoided in hard news reporting, especially when covering politics. There was a story on a state senator resigning to become a lobbyist and the reporter's lead was more appropriate for an opinion piece then news reporting. It gives me the impression that the Minnpost is an attempt to give voice to all spectrums of the political arena. That the attempt to report objectively is a vain and futile effort and to allow its reporters to report the news from their own subjective bias.

The one feature that I found most important to me as a reader was the "about us" bio information and the one website that I thought was the most open and revealing was Minnpost. Gawker and Alarabiya talked about their websites but they did not reveal any information about who is behind the website. Who funds the website and what are their professional backgrounds. All three website design's did not inspire me with trust and first impressions are important, I will be the first to admit that first impressions can be wrong, as was my first impression of Minnpost, but with many viewers and readers you only have that first impression, if you lose them you often times won't have them return. That's why design plays such an important role in the newspaper and the website.
Even though I found Alarabiya and Gawker reporting not to be of the top caliber I don't think that is the purpose of Gawker but Alarabiya is more deceptive in its presentation of the news and attempts to be the serious provider of mideast news when it is more a serious propagandist promoting the policies of Saudi Arabia.