Assignment 3

After briefly analyzing both the Huffington Post and Google News websites, they both seem like pretty good sources for news. However, for this assignment I had to choose which one I thought was better. I am going with Google News, and here is why. There is more variety in the available news content on the front page, more information underneath each news headline, and what appears to be more “important” news on the front page. I realize important news is subjective, but in my opinion it is important to have more, as apposed to less, of an abundance and variety of high profile news stories on the front page. 


The amount of variety on the front of Google News’s homepage is important because people have a tendency to click on a website, view the front page (or even just the top of the home page) briefly then decide whether or not they want to stay on that website or look elsewhere. This is actually a very common practice, as some of the articles we had to read for this week (“A Lot Of Top Journalists Don’t Look At Traffic Number’s. Here’s Why” to be specific) talked about how media consumers will often click on a link to a website (in this case, a link to Huffington Post or Google News) and will often only glance over the top of the page, front of the page, or the major headlines.  The fact that Google News has a higher variety of topics on the front top portion of the page makes it superior in that aspect. Another reason Google News is superior to the Huffington Post is because there is more text under each news headline. As we learned in class and from some other assigned articles (“How To Optimize Headlines Using The 65 Character Rule”, etc.) not only do media consumers have a tendency to glance over the front page of websites, they also have a tendency to only want to read or see the top headlines when it comes to news. They often times will not even read the entire article. This is why it is important to have those brief little captions under each news headline like Google News does, so that each news story can hopefully grab the readers attention so that they may want to read more. Huffington Post does do this for some of the news headlines, but not all like Google News does.  Also, one last point, when looking over the Google News front page, I saw more news stories overall covering a wider range of topics. Huffington Post does offer a wide range of topics as well, but they are not all right in your face on the front page like Google News. You have to click a separate section at the top of the page to access stories that aren’t “front page” news topics. Google News isn’t as much like this. Granted, you do have to click links on the side of the page to access more in depth news for certain subtopics, but the overall front page seems more diverse on Google News. Also, the news stories seem more “important” on Google News’s front page to me than Huffington Post, but I realize that is subjective and therefore isn’t really a true argument. 

In conclusion, I enjoyed Google News more than the Huffington Post and thought it to be a better overall site for media consumers to get their news from. However, I don’t think you can really go wrong either way!