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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.
 
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For a digital journalism class assignment, I had to photograph a person throughout the day to try and tell his story through photography. I chose my Resident Assistant, Brian Timmreck. I thought using an RA as my subject would be interesting because sometimes students simply look at the RA as the person who can get you in trouble. These photographs show that there are many different aspects of Timmreck's life and duties as an RA.

After completing a photography module on Poynter's NewsU website, I learned a lot of new information on the visual elements involved in photography and how to use them to create better photographs. Although I am still just a beginner, this project definitely helped me improve my skills.

I tried using perspective in many of my photographs, showing the duties of an RA that many residents might not normally see or pay attention to. I also took several personality portraits, trying to show the reader Brian's personality. I also used the "graphic" element in several of my photos.
 
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.
 
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“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.

 
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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.
 
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On the 10 year anniversary of September 11, 2001 and the week leading up to it, CNN.com provided a multitude of stories exploring different aspects of the day. While most content focused on stories of survivors and their family members, and America remembering the people killed in the attacks, several stories took different approaches.

A story on Monday, the main story on the homepage, stated "Why Muslims are Still Mad at America." I was surprised by the timing of this story. While the 9/11 attacks were the responsibility of a small group of Muslim extremists, many in the country struggle to differentiate the two, especially in regards to 9/11.

A good illustration of that is all of the hoopla surrounding the proposed mosque and community center being built three blocks from Ground Zero, and all of the anger and resurfaced emotions that it brought forth. So for CNN to do a story the week of 9/11 about "them" being mad at "us" was surprising. However, what better time to talk about this difficult subject then when it has been brought to the forefront of our minds because of the anniversary. The nature of the tragedy (i.e. thousands were killed) would hopefully force us to speak in a respectful tone as well.

The website used its iReporters as well to tell several stories of religion, lost loved ones, and calls to serve.

CNN.com offered a unique perspective of that tragic day through the eyes of President Bush's personal photographer. CNN.com also did a piece on the Jay-Z album released the morning of September 11, 2001. Jay-Z's album hit first-week sales that albums by Bob Dylan and Mariah Carey didn't come close to, and the article takes a look at why this was the case.

On September 11, 2001, CNN.com's homepage was devoted to coverage of September 11, as could be expected. However, CNN.com did not run any stories that seemed to have a unique edge to the story, something to make it stand out from every other news organization's coverage. It had an article that covered the various ceremonies and rememberances taking place throughout the day, and it also had a live feed to the ceremony taking place at Ground Zero, but these were things I found at most other news organization's websites.

The one piece that I did find interesting on CNN.coms homepage that offered a unique look at the anniversary was an article about how the Sunday Comics sections in newspapers would be honoring 9/11.

On September 12, CNN.com had all but moved on from 9/11 anniversary coverage, with an article about the Ground Zero memorial opening to the public, and a general recap of the previous day's happenings.

 
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CNN already had a well-established 24-hour news network, but it was not satisfied with that. It added a website where news junkies can find almost everything they are looking for, combining classic journalistic reporting with entertainment news and even helping the average joe become a reporter.

Anyone who wanted to be a reporter but never received the chance to do so now has that chance with CNN.com's iReport tab. Simply make a CNN account and you can post your own reports on CNN.com for everyone to share. CNN will not even edit what you write, so long as it is not reported as offensive. Traditionally readers can only leave comments on news websites or send letters to the editor to get their voice heard.

CNN.com has a U.S. edition, an International edition (which offers you news from six different regions of the world), and a Mexico edition, so whether you are visiting from a foreign country or just want to read the news from a global perspective, or prefer reading Spanish text, CNN has you covered.

The traditional row of tabs can be found on the CNN.com homepage. These tabs include U.S., World, Health, Living, Politics, and Entertainment. I found the politics tab very interesting, with stories about or updates on just about everything going on in Washington D.C. The Tech tab helps keep you abreast of the latest offering the tech world has for you (and we all know that the tech world comes up with something new every day).

While many newspapers, such as my Chicago Tribune, get most of their online content from their paper edition, which has a limited space and where much of that space is devoted to local goings-on, CNN is able to explore almost any topic it wants to, because it is not trying to sell its content to one certain area like newspapers, but to the whole country (and world).

However, if you want local news, there is a bar on the homepage where you can type in your zip code and find stories from local papers. CNN also has a bar where it shows stories that your Facebook friends have shared, helping CNN take advantage of social media and helping you find stories your friends are looking at.

The tabs at CNN.com will also take you to SI.com for your sports fix (I'd recommend ESPNChicago.com for everything you need to know about sports- but if you are by chance interested in other teams, SI is a good website) and CNN Money for the latest on your customized stocks (again, just set up an account to follow live updates of the stocks you want to follow).

While I was not suprised by the wide range of topics that CNN.com covers, I was suprised with how in-depth that material was. CNN definitely will have plenty of quality stories and content for us to look at, so I hope you check out my weekly updates.
 
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Hello, everyone. I am Ben, and I'm a sophomore at Marquette University in Milwaukee. I set up this blog for my Digital Journalism class, and this is my first blog posting for this class and ever. Hopfully we can have some fun with this blog but still look at some of the problems that CNN.cMy instructor for this class is Mr. Herbert Lowe. He has a blog too that you might find interesting, so check it out.

Usually when I am looking for news on the television I will turn on CNN, and I often check out CNN.com on my iPhone between classes. I will be blogging at least once a week based on topics on CNN.com. Hopefully this will be informative for you as I blog about various hot-button topics such as politics and celebrities. 

In my blogs, I will try to give my personal comments on the subject of the articles on CNN.com but also how CNN chose to cover the information and how it might differ from other news sources. I will try to have some fun with it as well. I will have plenty of links in my postings that will take you to even more information as well.

    Author

    I am a journalism and political science major in Marquette University's Diederich College of Communication. This is my site for Digital Journalism II.

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