BY OFENTSE RAMATSETSE
Online news and Journalism in South Africa continues to dominate the traditional media across media landscape. It augments interactivity among media consumers or readers from across the country. Online news organizations tell stories differently to its heterogeneous audience. There are many divergent online news organizations like News24, SABC news, Eye Witness News (EWN) and so on.
1. News24
The website is updated virtually every hour, with worldwide news stories. The site doesn’t only have news feeds to accommodate certain fraction of audience, but has other section like health24 where readers get to learn more about their health state; section like ‘jobs’ where prospective employees could find job. Its content is effective, comprehensible and easy to read.
Its news content is accessible and not time-consuming especially if you want to read latest news. The site has a compilation of ‘old’ or recent stories and current news stories. Its multimedia is bad! It takes much more time be accessed or uploaded. The layout of the site is appealing and colour used is blue which makes it even more attractive. Most of the News24 content is occupied by many advertisements.
2. Eye Witness News (EWN)
The website is more broadcast-oriented and covers mostly national and regional news stories. The content of the site is not as effective as it should be. The site has only fewer advertisements, and as a result, there is more blank space or ‘white space available. It’s mainly news-focused and doesn’t incorporates other sections aimed at educating readers and/or conscientizing them about social issues surrounding them. Interestingly, the site has podcasts where one could listen to news bulletins and traffic reports rather than reading them. Its news content, particularly, articles are very concise, brief and straight to the point.
The colour used not appealing more readers to read the entire news content and doesn’t have much of amusing games to keep readers entertained. However, it has SMS alerts which help many readers to stay posted. Its multimedia is effective and uploads videos fast.
3. SABC News
The website uploads national and international news stories very often. The content is more attractive and goes hand-in-hand with its audio links. By virtue of technological improvements and inception of new media, Face book and Twitter are mostly utilized as social networking forms to interact with readers from afar. Readers don’t necessarily need to use computer internet to access SABC page, even through cell phones one can access the page and stay as informed as possible without using computer.
The site is only news-oriented and doesn’t offer other sections that can help readers with more information about health and communal issues.
REFERENCES:
No comments:
Post a Comment