Online News Analysis

Online News Analysis

USA Today

The newspaper USA Today is 30 years old now and the company has recently applied major changes to it, which now add to the features and utility of the paper. USA Today is the second most circulated paper of United States, and now contains a new logo that alters with the main story of news, bright colors, and more infographics and photos. When it was launched back in the year 1982, features like big photos, buzzy graphics and small articles were only found in this newspaper, but now those features are widely used the newspaper business (USA Today, 2012).

Drastic changes have been applied to the newspaper's website and now alongside the new masthead, a color-coded circle is placed that is specifically designed for each section. The new logo has a photo or graphic attached to the top stories of the day. The states box now includes photos as well, and they occupy an entire page, along with the section covering stories from each state. Apart from that, the new weather map has been designed to be sleeker. The TV listings will now be supported by entries for series of web that are premium, and directions on where to locate the multimedia features are also given. For the purpose of social media marketing, a section is introduced that is termed as 'Your Say', where people are able to give comments from Facebook and include tweets. The 'Your Say' section allows readers to post their comments just the way the editorial section in the printed newspaper enables them to give their feedback and comments. All these newly revamped features of the newspaper ensure that it is now progressing towards the age of the internet from the TV age.

What the New Website Looks Like

The needs change as time changes and that has made the new website of USA Today now look like an application of iPad, as it is heavily centered on photos, and stories that appear to be influenced by multimedia in the sense that they fade from the home page and if the reader wants to read the next story, he has to click on right or left arrows. The new look which is now more like applications and fluid, is likely to cause visitors to attempt swiping their desktop screens.

All these features, however, are not present in the print version of the newspaper as these features include a lot of interactivity and technicalities of web design have been applied to make the website look more attractive to readers.The revamped website resemble the tablet version that can be created for a publication, and contains buttons that allow users to flip pages, whereas in the print version people have to flip pages manually. Apart from that, the ads featured on the full-screen are interactive and appear between stories, whereas in the printed newspaper, the ads cannot be interactive (USA Today, 2012).

This website certainly adds more value to me as a consumer for ...