Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

I have thought this several times recently, but I thought I would solicit an opinion. Does it bother you when a web site as large as CNN has news stories on the front page that are only available as video?

This is today’s CNN page “above the fold”:

Green indicates images and ads, which are fine and understandable, red indicates video only content. Judging off the cuff, that means that viewing the front page only what, 30% is readable news content. I don’t mind videos as alternate content, but there were several news stories I wanted to scan that were video only. Scanning an article for anything interesting in 5-10 seconds is much better than having to watch a 4 minute video clip to get the point.

Not to toot my employer’s horn too much, but look at this in contrast to MSNBC.com

So the alternative here is 5 stories that are available as video alternate content, and one single video only story.

I guess I should have went to MSNBC.com first.