NBC News-based Headline News Summary
Continuing with testing of news sources other than Google World News, I put together a concise headlines list based upon the World News - Breaking International News Headlines - NBC News page. This took me just 8 minutes (compared to approx 1.1 hours for BBC, 2.5 for CNN World News).
Beneath the following summary based on the NBC News website content for 3/20/2015, I discuss possible areas of improvement for the NBC News website (the summary is not broken up into US/Nuclear-nations/non-nuclear nations/global this time):
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...ONGOING: EBOLA VIRUS OUTBREAK ISIS TERROR
...Yemen Blasts: Suicide Bombers Strike Sanaa Mosques, Killing 137 ...300 Injured in Suicide Blasts...India Cheating Scandal: 600 Students Expelled at Bihar Schools 600 Cheating Students Send India Officials Up the Wall...Afghan Woman Stoned, Set Alight After Allegedly Burning Quran Woman Stomped, Stoned, Set Alight in Afghan Capital
...White House Critical of Netanyahu's 'Lack of Commitment' on Two-State Solution...Solar Eclipse Lures Sky-Gazers on First Day of Spring...ISIS Is Rich, But Spending Money Fast...Syrian Forces Launch Airstrikes in Aleppo...Couple Convicted of Concealing 271 Stolen Picassos...Cheats Climb High in Eastern India...Japan Arrests Suspect in Phone Threats to U.S. Installations...A 52-year-old Japanese man has been arrested for allegedly phoning threats to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and Camp Schwab on Okinawa...Tunisia Attack: Is Arab Spring's Success Story Over?...Death Toll From Museum Siege Climbs...Prince Harry Vows to Do 'All I Can' to Help Veterans...Woman Arrested for Allegedly Faking Cancer and Collecting Money...
7 Incredible Women You've Never Even Heard Of GLOBALPOST.COM A Baked Eggs Dish That's Just as Tasty as It Looks...EPICURIOUS.COM Blow Your Chinese Delivery Spot Out Of The Water With This Dish EPICURIOUS.COM...REALSIMPLE.COM Foods Most Likely to Have Germs That Can Make You Sick HEALTH.COM
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COMMENT (not ordered by numbered points this time, but longer than usual this time for some reason)
IMHO, the NBC News pages could be improved in certain ways:
It took me only 8 minutes to produce the summary notes for the day from the page. However the page was chockful of errors, the net effect of which is that the page and the pages on its site that it links to, are sort of repulsive and not anything one would want to return to given the multitude of choices available in the internet world.
What connected & therefore experienced halfwit (who however has an eye for picturesque imagery) designed or coded their page? Seems the page is the product of coke-addled brains that never had to be exercised because the owners of the brains hail from affluent families.
The page and the pages it links to are filled with mindnumbing unnecessary boring, distracting tiring depressing stress-producing clutter & redundancy; and the pages are slow to load and to scroll.
The Menu-Banner at the top consumes too much vertical space, much too much, about 3" at 100% magnification. When you scroll, unbelievably, you cannot get away from the oversized menu banner at the top of the page. The pages are slow to load and to scroll, and do not scroll smoothly.
When you open a link in a new tab, the video starts playing and you are forced to hear the audio of it, without you first giving your permission by clicking a button.
The top section is 'news>WORLD', which looks silly because world is in big bold font and news is in small light font. The 'news>WORLD' section contains 3 columns, in the left 2 columns, on top there is a photo related to the top story and then a headline, and beneath the headline it says 'WORLD'. Clicking 'WORLD' merely sends you back to the page you are alread on. Yet, 'WORLD' is repeated under five of the headlines in the 'news>WORLD' section, cluttering up the page and distracting the eye and the mind.
Subject labels that send to subject timelines etc should go into a menu dropdown link, and be included in the page that is linked to; such would reduce clutter.
Clutter is created due to the 'VIDEO' label that is instituted in link headlines that lead to a page containing video; yet link headlines that do not contain the VIDEO label also sometimes lead to pages that contain videos.
An entire half inch wide column that runs from the top to the bottom of the page, contains nothing but a feedback button. And, the feedback does not lead to a form for expressing your opinion re a story but rather to a multiple-choice survey!
When you click on a link to go to a page on the site, at the linked-to page, you get without asking for it, other photos and stories and videos, stacked up beneath the video or story you linked to. This slows down loading and scrolling.
The world 'GALLERY' is unnecessarily included in links such as 'The Week in Pictures'.
The second section underneath the top section is 'TOP WORLD - NBC NEWS VIDEOS'. The headlines lead to coverage that is video not text, but if you scroll down, as in the first section, you get unrelated content that the link you clicked on has nothing to do with. The videos linked to are badly crushed horizontally by a verbose, horizontally fat column containing links and photo-links to other videos. The 'top videos' column is redundantly repeated inside this fat obtrusive column next to the video.
Some of the headlines in this section are accompanied by large images with yellow boxes with black triangles in the middle. Clicking on the headline, and clicking on the image take you to the same page. The yellow boxes mess up the image, and the images are usually of low quality, boring, & uninformative. Yet these image-links take up a huge amount of space on a page that is already cluttered. Although the headline for this section states 'VIDEOS', the world VIDEO is repeated 4 times in this section, in headlines that are not accompanied by an image.
This section contains a repeat of a link-headline already found in the first section, and also contains a headline that is not repeated elsewhere on the page. Great! Redundancy and clutter, PLUS not knowing whether a section is composed of repeats of headlines already encountered, or composed of headlines not seen elsewhere.
The next section, is entitled 'MORE WORLD'. This section features the same problems as found in the 'TOP WORLD' section that precedes it. In addition, the word 'WORLD' is repeated with 26 of the headlines, but clicking on 'WORLD' simply takes you back to the page you are already on.
The final section, 'AROUND THE WEB', contains links to content at other sites; each headline-link is accompanied by a link which gives the name of the site linked to. However both links take you to the same page. The links take you to a 'zergnet' headline links page, which you have to click on to continue to the page the link text allegedly was sending you to. The result is that you have to click twice and wait for page load twice before getting to the page the link was supposed to take you to. Normally when you hover the mouse-pointer over a link, you can find out what website is linked to by looking in the status bar, you don't have to go to an intermediate page before getting to the link, you don't have to click twice to get to the link, you don't have to endure the clutter of text that tells you which site the linked to page is on.
TV stations need to integrate their TV with their websites; for example send them to a search engine on their website that allows them to search the site for content related to what they heard about on the TV broadcast (incredibly the boneheads have still not instituted this); but if their websites are trash, attempting such will just drag them down.
Beneath the following summary based on the NBC News website content for 3/20/2015, I discuss possible areas of improvement for the NBC News website (the summary is not broken up into US/Nuclear-nations/non-nuclear nations/global this time):
---
...ONGOING: EBOLA VIRUS OUTBREAK ISIS TERROR
...Yemen Blasts: Suicide Bombers Strike Sanaa Mosques, Killing 137 ...300 Injured in Suicide Blasts...India Cheating Scandal: 600 Students Expelled at Bihar Schools 600 Cheating Students Send India Officials Up the Wall...Afghan Woman Stoned, Set Alight After Allegedly Burning Quran Woman Stomped, Stoned, Set Alight in Afghan Capital
...White House Critical of Netanyahu's 'Lack of Commitment' on Two-State Solution...Solar Eclipse Lures Sky-Gazers on First Day of Spring...ISIS Is Rich, But Spending Money Fast...Syrian Forces Launch Airstrikes in Aleppo...Couple Convicted of Concealing 271 Stolen Picassos...Cheats Climb High in Eastern India...Japan Arrests Suspect in Phone Threats to U.S. Installations...A 52-year-old Japanese man has been arrested for allegedly phoning threats to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and Camp Schwab on Okinawa...Tunisia Attack: Is Arab Spring's Success Story Over?...Death Toll From Museum Siege Climbs...Prince Harry Vows to Do 'All I Can' to Help Veterans...Woman Arrested for Allegedly Faking Cancer and Collecting Money...
7 Incredible Women You've Never Even Heard Of GLOBALPOST.COM A Baked Eggs Dish That's Just as Tasty as It Looks...EPICURIOUS.COM Blow Your Chinese Delivery Spot Out Of The Water With This Dish EPICURIOUS.COM...REALSIMPLE.COM Foods Most Likely to Have Germs That Can Make You Sick HEALTH.COM
---
COMMENT (not ordered by numbered points this time, but longer than usual this time for some reason)
IMHO, the NBC News pages could be improved in certain ways:
It took me only 8 minutes to produce the summary notes for the day from the page. However the page was chockful of errors, the net effect of which is that the page and the pages on its site that it links to, are sort of repulsive and not anything one would want to return to given the multitude of choices available in the internet world.
What connected & therefore experienced halfwit (who however has an eye for picturesque imagery) designed or coded their page? Seems the page is the product of coke-addled brains that never had to be exercised because the owners of the brains hail from affluent families.
The page and the pages it links to are filled with mindnumbing unnecessary boring, distracting tiring depressing stress-producing clutter & redundancy; and the pages are slow to load and to scroll.
The Menu-Banner at the top consumes too much vertical space, much too much, about 3" at 100% magnification. When you scroll, unbelievably, you cannot get away from the oversized menu banner at the top of the page. The pages are slow to load and to scroll, and do not scroll smoothly.
When you open a link in a new tab, the video starts playing and you are forced to hear the audio of it, without you first giving your permission by clicking a button.
The top section is 'news>WORLD', which looks silly because world is in big bold font and news is in small light font. The 'news>WORLD' section contains 3 columns, in the left 2 columns, on top there is a photo related to the top story and then a headline, and beneath the headline it says 'WORLD'. Clicking 'WORLD' merely sends you back to the page you are alread on. Yet, 'WORLD' is repeated under five of the headlines in the 'news>WORLD' section, cluttering up the page and distracting the eye and the mind.
Subject labels that send to subject timelines etc should go into a menu dropdown link, and be included in the page that is linked to; such would reduce clutter.
Clutter is created due to the 'VIDEO' label that is instituted in link headlines that lead to a page containing video; yet link headlines that do not contain the VIDEO label also sometimes lead to pages that contain videos.
An entire half inch wide column that runs from the top to the bottom of the page, contains nothing but a feedback button. And, the feedback does not lead to a form for expressing your opinion re a story but rather to a multiple-choice survey!
When you click on a link to go to a page on the site, at the linked-to page, you get without asking for it, other photos and stories and videos, stacked up beneath the video or story you linked to. This slows down loading and scrolling.
The world 'GALLERY' is unnecessarily included in links such as 'The Week in Pictures'.
The second section underneath the top section is 'TOP WORLD - NBC NEWS VIDEOS'. The headlines lead to coverage that is video not text, but if you scroll down, as in the first section, you get unrelated content that the link you clicked on has nothing to do with. The videos linked to are badly crushed horizontally by a verbose, horizontally fat column containing links and photo-links to other videos. The 'top videos' column is redundantly repeated inside this fat obtrusive column next to the video.
Some of the headlines in this section are accompanied by large images with yellow boxes with black triangles in the middle. Clicking on the headline, and clicking on the image take you to the same page. The yellow boxes mess up the image, and the images are usually of low quality, boring, & uninformative. Yet these image-links take up a huge amount of space on a page that is already cluttered. Although the headline for this section states 'VIDEOS', the world VIDEO is repeated 4 times in this section, in headlines that are not accompanied by an image.
This section contains a repeat of a link-headline already found in the first section, and also contains a headline that is not repeated elsewhere on the page. Great! Redundancy and clutter, PLUS not knowing whether a section is composed of repeats of headlines already encountered, or composed of headlines not seen elsewhere.
The next section, is entitled 'MORE WORLD'. This section features the same problems as found in the 'TOP WORLD' section that precedes it. In addition, the word 'WORLD' is repeated with 26 of the headlines, but clicking on 'WORLD' simply takes you back to the page you are already on.
The final section, 'AROUND THE WEB', contains links to content at other sites; each headline-link is accompanied by a link which gives the name of the site linked to. However both links take you to the same page. The links take you to a 'zergnet' headline links page, which you have to click on to continue to the page the link text allegedly was sending you to. The result is that you have to click twice and wait for page load twice before getting to the page the link was supposed to take you to. Normally when you hover the mouse-pointer over a link, you can find out what website is linked to by looking in the status bar, you don't have to go to an intermediate page before getting to the link, you don't have to click twice to get to the link, you don't have to endure the clutter of text that tells you which site the linked to page is on.
TV stations need to integrate their TV with their websites; for example send them to a search engine on their website that allows them to search the site for content related to what they heard about on the TV broadcast (incredibly the boneheads have still not instituted this); but if their websites are trash, attempting such will just drag them down.
posted by David Virgil at 9:14 PM
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