Christmas is less than three weeks away, and winter break for college students like myself less than two weeks away. And with Christmas just around the corner, New Year's isn't much farther down the line. CNN.com recently highlighted an article on their homepage revisiting the major news stories of 2011 that dominated the headlines.

Scrolling through the article brings back to memory how many events have happened this year, from the devastating earthquakes in Japan to the end of a ten year hunt to find Osama Bin Laden, to the killing of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The article covers multiple other news stories, providing links to CNN.com's coverage with every one of them.

CNN.com also offers an interactive graphic that allows you to choose from the top 20 news stories of the last 12 months and customize your top ten. People can submit their choices and view the results of others' choices.

Reviewing all of the major news stories and just how complex they are reminded me just how daunting a task it is for CNN.com to cover so many stories with in-depth quality. And with CNN recently cutting 50 staffers, that task will prove even more difficult, as 2012 is sure to be just as exciting.

The CNN.com article ends with this: Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in October. His final words, according to his sister, were "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow!" Fitting words for 2011.

For my latest blog posting, I decided to take a look at CNN Heroes. CNN Heroes is a project CNN has undertaken to shine the spotlight on America's often unsung heroes.

CNN.com currently has 10 CNN Heroes finalists, and people who register with CNN.com (which also allows you to fill out iReports) can vote for who they think should win the award of CNN Hero of the Year.

CNN.com put together a nice multimedia package to cover their heroes, including photos, videos, graphics, and articles. CNN will also be airing a special, CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute, December 11th at 7p.m. The CNN Heroes fall into various categories: community crusaders, championing children, medical marvels, defending the planet. 

CNN has narrowed their heroes down to the top ten, all of whom are either community crusaders or championing children heroes.

CNN Heroes is definitely a nice project by CNN, offering some good hearty news, when many of my blog postings have covered CNN.com's coverage of negative news such as the deaths of Steve Jobs and Andy Rooney, and CNN.com's home page has been covered in recent weeks with reports of sexual exploitation of children by two assistant college coaches. The project also gives some well-deserved attention to people who are devoting their time and energy to helping others and trying to make the world a better place to live in.

While CNN.com contains plenty of tradional news articles and videos keeping people up to date on the day's breaking news and hot topics, the website also provides blog and podcasts to entertain and inform its viewers.

CNN.com does not give its blogs and podcasts sections any prominent display on the homepage. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find links to the blogs and podcasts pages. For newcomers to podcasting, the podcast page offers a small introduction to what it is and how it works.

People can listen to various content with CNN's podcasts, from a political notebook podcast, to a simple news updates podcast, and even a CNN Student News podcast that focuses on middle and highschool classrooms. Unfortunately, I cannot provide links to these podcasts, as they can only be accessed directly from CNN.com's podcast center.
CNN.com also offers dozens of blogs, with topics ranging for sports to food to Anderson Cooper. CNN's Viewer Communications Management Team has even created a blog, CNN.com Behind the Scenes, which is described as a blog for the viewers and all about the viewers.

While CNN.com does not provide any sports content (rather, it sends viewers to Sports Illustrated's website, SI.com), it does have a blog on sports, CNN World Sport. Rather than focusing on scores and updates, it delves into  other issues and aspects in sports, such as racism and a blog on the quality of this year's MLB postseason.

I think that CNN.com has done a good job delving into the worlds of blogging and podcasting, offering truly unique content that is a mix of information and entertainment. However, CNN.com needs to do a much better job highlighting these aspects of their website.

With so many primary debates taking place for the 2012 republican presidential nomination, I thought this would be a good time to explore the CNN.com political tab.

The page is a bit scrambled, with so much information, but it is easy enough to navigate. There are different sections for Congress, the White House, and news buzz (currently following Chelsea Clinton's new job as NBC political reporter).

CNN.com has also already created a 2012 election center that can be accessed from the politics tab. The election center gives updates on all of the recent debates and developments, such as the latest poll results, which most recently saw a surge for New Gingrich's supporters.

The politics tab also contains plenty of opinion pieces from CNN.com writers, such as this article from David Frum on why the Euro crisis should be a concern in American politics. If you want local politics, CNN.com has you covered as well, although the website thought I was in West Virginia when I was in Milwaukee, so I was getting updates from towns I've never heard of.

If you want local politics, CNN.com has you covered as well, although the website thought I was in West Virginia when I was in Milwaukee, so I was getting updates from towns I've never heard of.

After CBS announced the death of "60 minutes" essayist Andy Rooney, CNN.com put together an obituary package that included articles on his career and impact as a writer, and videos that had former coworkers and bosses sharing their insights on Rooney.

The four-time Emmy Award winner was famed for his grouchiness, and CNN.com paid homage to that, with an article full of some of Rooney's best rants and video slideshow borrowed from Time that featured 10 of Rooney's most memorable segments.

CNN.com's coverage of Rooney's death was well-rounded, although I found it odd that the website had two videos that were practically word for word the same audio, one narrated by Gary Tuchman and one by Karen Caifa.

The death of Rooney was the top subject on CNN.com's "Newspulse", which shows the most popular stories at the moment. By Saturday night, the death of Rooney had been replaced on CNN.com's homepage by news of LSU's defeat over Alabama in college football. I wonder if Rooney would have had something to say about that...

CNN.com is very good at covering breaking news, from the death of American inventor Steve Jobs to the death of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The website is sure to have multiple in-depth articles and videos covering the news in a very quick time frame.

A quick search for Gadhafi on CNN.com will bring up 23 pages of results that have been updated since the first reports of Gadhafi's capture and death--230 results in total. CNN.com did not just have articles that explained that facts of the situation. The results range from videos from CNN's television broadcast to reactions from Libyans shooting into the air to American pundits writing about what this means for Libya and the United States.

One video was of a high school teacher who had her second grade class write letters to Gadhafi in 1986. Gadhafi actually responded to the letters, although he spinned what the second-graders had written into pro-Gadhafi propaganda. The video showed the letters and had the teacher reflecting on what Gadhafi's death means to her.



CNN's Breaking News Twitter account was also constantly updating the news. The first tweet said that Gadhafi had been captured, followed by tweets that a "big fish" had been captured, but it was unconfirmed whether it was Gadhafi, to tweets that the leader had been killed, although this was followed by tweets that this could not be confirmed.

Shocked is a word I heard a lot on Wednesday after the world found out Steve Jobs had died. This was one of those "where were you when you found out?" deaths for many people, especially those of the younger generations. Even ESPN.com had an article on its homepage announcing his death. CNN.com dedicated the rest of its night to not only the death of Steve Jobs, but the life and legacy of the Apple co-founder.

CNN.com quickly had a video posted on its website highlighting some of Jobs' bigger Apple product introductions, such as the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad2. The site also had several other videos and links to articles at the top of its homepage in a "Steve Jobs box" of sorts. The coverage of Jobs' death overshadowed the wall street protests that had previously headlined the homepage, and Sarah Palin's announcement that she will not be running for president in 2012, a piece of news that might otherwise have demanded the spotlight.

CNN.com also had a heavy focus on opinion pieces, all of them positive outlook on Jobs, such as this one on how he gave writers freedom of font.


Articles could be found under several CNN.com tabs as well, such as CNN Tech. CNNMoney had an article on "10 ways Steve Jobs has changed the world," highlighting some of Apple's best-selling products. CNN also highlighed the global impact of Jobs and his death, sharing an article on reactions in China.

When someone visists an article on Jobs, for now at least, on the right hand side next to the article, a long list of other articles on  Jobs can still be found, such as with this article on Jobs' true impact on the tech world.

While CNN.com's site dedicated most of its homepage to Steve Jobs on Wednesday night and Thursday, by Friday, he had all but disappeared. CNN.com had shifted its coverage of Jobs to its "Tech" tab. As late as Saturday, almost a dozen of the top articles on CNN.com/tech had to do with Jobs, and others with Apple and its new iPhone. The Tech page still had stories on Job's private funeral and cause of death Tuesday, six days after his death.

 CNN.com certainly dedicated resources and space to covering Jobs' death and reviewing his life and accomplishments. However, it was quickly replaced by other news, and an article that put a nice close to the coverage has yet to appear.

In our digital journalism course last week, we discussed the elements of photography and how photography is used in media. So how does CNN.com employ photojournalism to help tell today's top stories?

The Wall Street protests are a subject that lends itself to many good photographs, such as the photo above, but the article covering the protests on CNN.com used had just that one picture, with no links to other pictures or articles that more heavily featured photographs. This as a missed opportunity for CNN.com. For something like protests, photographs and videos are a great way to help tell the story, especially in a timeline format.

Monday, the big story was Amanda Knox winning her appeal on murder charges. The article featured just one photograph at thet top of the page, which is standard for their articles. However, the live CNN.com blog covering the appeal featured multiple photographs showing scenes inside and outside the courtroom. Although some of the photgraphs were not very clear, it still aided in telling the story and showing what was going on.

For CNN.com's coverage of the 10th anniversary of September 11, it featured many stirring photos. But that was not unique to CNN, as most news organizations used photography, showing mourners on the day of the anniversary, phots of the memorial and news buildings, or taking us back ten years to the actual day. photography was a prominent use for story-telling that day, including on CNN.com.

But other than that, CNN relies more on video than photgraphy, which makes sense considering CNN.com has videos from the CNN television network at the ready than can be used in its coverage. However, with ABC News and Yahoo! recently teaming up deliver online-first content, it is more important for CNN to use unique coverage on its website and rely less on CNN news videos.

“The class assignment for tomorrow is to tweet.” Nowadays, most students would love to hear that uttered from their professor. Journalism 1550 was recently assigned to live-tweet Marquette University’s presidential inauguration (to see how we did, check out my Storify). While it was a bit nerve-racking at first, our hash tags ended up trending in the Milwaukee area. If sophomore journalism students can live-tweet, what about news organizations?

One subject that is particularly built for live-tweeting is sports. Unlike the Chicago Tribune, the beat of my classmate Kyle Doubrava, CNN.com does not cover everyday sports events. They outsource that job to Sports Illustrated’s website, SI.com (SI and CNN are both owned by parent company Time Warner). 

SI.com (twitter handle @SInow) has a “Top Stories on Twitter” tab on its homepage, and it also has a “Twackle” tab. Twackle (@Twackle), an SI.com network site according to SI.com, is everything Twitter and sports-- covering all the hot-topic sports stories, and allowing visitors to select specific cities and region for stories. ESPN.com wrote a story about how Twackle is changing the realm of sports tweeting, which can be found here.

A search on Twitter for CNN will bring up dozens of different CNN Twitter feeds, including CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk), the most followed CNN affiliated twitter feed, and CNN (@CNN). Twitter feeds can also be found for CNNpolitics, CNNiReport, and individual CNN anchors, such as Piers Morgan and The Situation Room's Wolf Blitzer.

CNN.com's stories also have the Twitter logo button at the top of the page that, if clicked, takes the person to his or her Twitter account, with a tweet prepared by CNN tha has a short description of the story and a link. All the person has to do is hit "tweet."

CNN is more selective with its Tweets than news organizations like the Huffington Post (@HuffingtonPost tweeted 87 times September 29) and New York Times (42 tweets for @nytimes). @CNN had ten tweets that same day and @cnnbrk, CNN's Breaking News twitter feed, had just 20 tweets that day. All of these tweets included links that send people to CNN.com.

CNN covered a story in which on the side the live Twitter feed of @natlsecuritycnn was displayed. The article was "US close to adding Haqqani network to terror list," so this is a great strategy by CNN to gets its readers to read multiple articles. People interested in national security and foreign/national politics reading this article can now find right next to it tweets with links to other similar current issues.

Compared to other national news organizations ABC News and USA Today, CNN seems to be keeping pace, if not a bit ahead of the curve. Classmate Tessa Fox, in her blog about ABC News, said ABC News "doesn't typically rely on social media reporting such as live tweeting." 

Another classmate, Allison Kruschke, in her blog on USA Today, wrote that "USA Today's main use of Twitter was breaking news and attaching a link to a corresponding story on their website," similar to CNN.com and their Twitter.

 So while overall I was impressed with how CNN is employing Twitter, they do not do any live-tweeting on the scale that my journalism class did. This is a shame, because with all of the resources that CNN has, they could surely do a great job.

Learning how to "Write For the Ears" this past week using Poynter's News University NewsU, I took a look at CNN.com's website to see how what type of audio they had in their videos.

Most of the videos on CNN.com come from their CNN cable news channel programming, rather than any content made exclusively for their website, with CNN anchors talking for many of the videos' openings. This is different than most news organizations whose primary news delivery is print (such as magazines or newspapers), and so all their online videos are exclusively online content, and developed exclusively for the web.

One feature story on CNN.com's website was about a man who served 20 years in prison for murder. He was being interviewed about his remorse, why he had committed murder, and how he had changed. The video was exclusively him talking, with some soft country background music; no reporter's questions or narrative was in the video.

Another video, originnaly aired on "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer" explained President Obama's new tax increase proposals for the rich, and listed some loopholes that let rich people like Warren Buffet pay less in taxes.

Overall, it would have been nice to see CNN.com produce some web-exclusive content. All of their videos seemed to follow the same format, and it was obvious that the videos had been recycled from their news network.