My take on BBC News- World

For my newstrack blog, I have decided to do BBC News-World. There are many reasons behind this, the first one being that I need to keep up-to-date with general news for all my classes, and this is a way to kill a few birds with one stone. Also, I like the general layout of the site, I think it is very easy to navigate and for some reason I have always found it to be more user-friendly than the New York Times, Boston Globe or other sites. Perhaps because it uses more color and is not as serious as those nwspaper sites. Thirdly, I didn't want to chose an American site because I feel like every time I read an American newspaper or browse an American news site I get mostly American stories and stories that affect only America. I suppose this is true of most countries, but I really just find it very self-absorbed and I do want to know what is going on in other parts of the world. I also don't want that overflow of Middle East stories, plus I would like to know more about the situation in Europe since I find that topic to be very interesting right now. This week in class we talked about some very important topics: convergence, or multimedia journalism, which is the taking of different types of media and putting them together to create a coherent story; parallel reporting, which is telling the same story, just using a different form to tell it; interactivity, which is not just reading a story, but also being able to participate; evergreen, which is a story that is always going to be relevant and useful, and finally the good ol' user-generated content, a way to make everyone published. Most of BBC's news posts are structured like this: at the top is a picture or a video, and then comes the narrative story. This is similar to most news sites.What I find I don't like about BBC was that there is no space feedback or commentary from users. This is the modern day version of "letters to the editor" and allows you to get a grasp on what others are thinking. It is sad that BBC does not leave this space for its users to comment. After a thorough inspection of the site, I have decided that it was far too simple and not visually appealing enough. I understand that many of these news sites like to keep the pages simple and clean, but I just think there could be a lot more interesting things going on. Why not have more multimedia up on each of their stories? I do like the interactive map of the world that takes you to each section of the world. Since it is BBC News-World, this is an important thing to have, but I feel like it should be incorporated in a more visually appealing way. I do like the idea, though. I also liked the "Day in Pictures" slide show. It is an example of parallel reporting, or just telling the same story, like the story of September 11 in Georgia Tech, just in a visually interesting way.