CNN Twitter Goes All Out for State of The Union

I always go to CNN for my political coverage, mostly because I think they do the best job of ignoring the 'partisan hackery," to quote Jon Stewart. But I also think their use of social media, especially Twitter, is really cutting-edge.

Not only are all of their anchors on Twitter, but CNN forms and deletes Twitter accounts for every big story, and the State of the Union was no exception. The handle @cnnsotu was managed by John King, and allowed viewers to comment on Obama's speech at will, while receiving sporadic updates on CNN's coverage. But later, King used one of CNN's infamous "magic walls" to break down the Twitter page, analyzing reactions state-by-state. Not only did we see exit-poll-style numbers almost immediately following the speech, but the examples King read showed us how the proposals were interpreted locally and personally across the nation.

I think CNN did a good job of managing and editing their Twitter front for this big event. Viewers were not forced to suffer through hundreds of thousands of mindless tweets, like the YouTube viewers were in their comments section. CNN sifted through and chose an appropriate sample from a geographically and ideologically diverse range of users, and the result was appropriate and painless. In the future, I would have liked to see more blogging on their part, like what they did on their State of the Union ticker, but I think they were focused on making their analytical technology work. And I think what they ended up doing was pretty cool.

And I have to add this as a broadcast major. I noticed that the CNN TV feed got rid of all those annoying titles and charts other text at the bottom of the screen. If I wanted to read and watch at the same time, I knew to go on the internet.

Online Text Gets Smaller, Eyes Hurt More

I like to be able to see what I'm reading. My brain just hurts less when I try to read things that are easily visible.

This is why I am not a fan of the web versions of print newspapers. The dominating trend is to put as much information on the home page as humanly possible. They want you to read as much as possible while clicking as little as possible. Check out some of the links, which lead to NYTimes.com and my small-town paper's website, SantaCruzSentinel.com. Just look at the home pages, and see how much stuff is on there.

Now, I understand that there are some stories that are bigger than others. At the top of the page ("above the fold" in computer terms), there are five or six main stories that draw your attention right away. And most of the information I'm talking about is "below the fold" when your scroll down some. However, I feel like the website tries to look like the front page of the paper. You got headlines, followed by the first paragraph of the story. And that adds up to a lot of text.

This crowding has two effects on me as a reader.

First, I get distracted from the headline, which is what I want to read first. If I don't care about the headline, then I just skip over it. The sites I'm talking about don't let you skip over it - they foist half the story onto the page anyways, making you read it.

This brings me to my second point. The long blurb crowds the page, and makes all the other text smaller. And the instinct is to lean in to the computer screen to read smaller text. This has adverse effects on my eyes, and my head. As you lean in closer to the screen, your eyes just start to hurt.

What the newspaper companies need to figure out is that web text is different from print text. A newspaper does not generate light, it only reflects light into your eye. A computer screen, on the other hand, generates lots of little light waves that shoot off in all directions. The closer your eyes are to the screen, the more of these light waves hit your eye. This causes eye strain, brain overload, and in general, me quickly closing my web browser.

In contrast, I love the Washington Post's website because they take away the subtext. There's only a few words beneath the headlines, which can now be in bold font, which I can read from across the room. Which is what I ask for, when I'm scanning a page to see what stories I do and do not want to read.

More news sites should follow the Post's lead, and make the website and the newspaper two different entities.