Recently, CNN decided to shut down an independent feed of news on its Web site called CNN.com/live. This component on the Web site was basically another television station based completely online. The company’s reason for the shut down made sense: it already has a live news feed that goes to the television every day, and combining the two feeds would cut down costs.
Now, fair warning, I have not been a fan of CNN (the television station) for quite some time. However, I enjoyed the CNN.com/live feed for several reasons.
First, it really focused on news. There wasn’t as much push for pundits and commentators as there is on CNN-TV. For example, on the day of the balloon boy incident, CNN.com/live kept its feed on the balloon and the chase, while CNN-TV went back to its normal programming until the balloon crashed and no child was found inside. The television station was late announcing the news because it had gone back to normal programming. I very much dislike most of the daytime programming on CNN-TV. However, on the computer, I could watch all the news I wanted and have no pundit interrupt it with babble about Michelle Obama’s clothing or other nonsense.
The second reason I sincerely enjoyed CNN.com/Live is because the people who produced the feed realized long ago that Twitter, Facebook and computers are not new. As Marshall McLuhan once wrote, it is only when we stop talking about a medium as a medium that it truly has become a communications system. The people on the Web (who would be watching the programming) know what Twitter and Facebook are, and they have stopped referring to these social networking sites as new tools. They assume others know what they are and how they are used. They tell you to “Send a Facebook message’ or that they “Tweeted” something. CNN.com/Live acknowledged this and moved forward. CNN-TV did not.
This brings me to my final point of I preferred CNN.com/Live to CNN. CNN.com/Live never (at least when I watched) had shots of people working on a computer that then zoomed into the screen to show what they were looking at. I absolutely hate it when CNN zooms the camera into a computer screen to show the Twitter feed or the Facebook site. It looks unprofessional and lazy. It’s worse when they zoom into the touchscreen that the pundit is playing with just to show how cool the technology is. I asked one of the Ball State professors, who worked at CNN for a long time before he came to the university, why the producers chose to do this. He said, “Because they think it looks cool.” It doesn’t! It looks silly and out-of-touch.
Why don’t they just put the graphic on the screen instead of showing the computer screen? It looks cleaner and more professional when they do. I think I’m going to start a campaign against zooming in to computer screens. We’ll stand on the streets of Atlanta yelling “Don’t zoom in!” We’ll have a letter-writing campaign. We’ll stop watching and switch to MSNBC.
I probably won’t start a campaign like that. But I would like to see stations like these apply some production standards to their work.
Help me get this going. Help me make 24-hour television news just a little bit better. Maybe after we accomplish this, we can get them to stop developing stories about moot topics such as “Bush does not miss limelight.”
Tags: CNN