Online Content, A Day in the Life - Annual Report 2006

If Google and Yahoo represent Web search companies that are moving into journalism, CBSNews.com is at the leading edge of TV networks trying to manage their way into the interactive world. May 11 captured a day before the site was redesigned after the hiring of the online entrepreneur Larry Kramer as head of CBS Digital.

On the date of our Day in the Life study, however, CBS already offered users a clear top story that featured a photo, an interactive feature and video, followed by a second story that, with a click, also offered multiple features. A list of 14 more headlines sat under those. Some of the stories, however, were repeated in more than one place. This section was followed by the CBS Evening News Online Edition, a chance to watch the newscast online.

There were then 47 other headlines on the page, divided by categories — U.S., World, Health Watch, Entertainment, Opinion, Sci-Tech, Politics, Business, Evening News, Early Show.

Last May, the level of updating on the page was substantial, but there was also some effort to make the level of change look greater than it may have been. The top story and the second story, for instance, tended to be swapped back and forth, and other stories moved around the page. At 9 a.m. the Iraqi bombing led the page. By 1 p.m., the plane scare in D.C. grabbed the top story position, while the testimony of the actor Macaulay Culkin was second and the Iraq story moved to the right margin under a piece on the Zion slayings. At 5 p.m., the Culkin and plane-scare stories were reversed. There was also a noticeable slowing of the updating as time went on. At 1 p.m., 10 of the roughly 65 stories were either new or updated from 9 a.m. (though that wasn’t always signified to the reader). At 5 p.m. another 10 were new. By 9 p.m. just one more story was new, from WebMD.

CBS News Lead Stories

When it came to the numbers, the nature of a television-based site — versus an online aggregator or a newspaper — came into clear relief. Only some of the text on CBS.com came from CBS. None of the main text stories on the site through the day were produced by CBS alone, but 95% of them cited CBS staff and wires together. That is far different from the New York Times, where 90% of the stories were staff-written.

On the other hand, in non-text news, the amount of original content went way up. The site included dozens of video stories that were wholly original to CBS, mostly pieces from different broadcasts.

Indeed, like other TV-based Web sites, even back in May 2005, the site tended to excel at exploiting the multimedia nature of the Web. A remarkable 85% of its top stories had links to video of the events described, while none linked to just audio. Only 5% of the top stories gave users the ability to customize, and none of the top stories offered users specific links by which they could communicate with CBS about the presentation.

All that changed. The CBS page available in 2006 is significantly more of a continuous news source. The site includes a good amount of Internet-only video. It will track news events well after the nightly news is off the air, includes a section on “interactives” where users can find all the interactive features on the page in one place, and includes a special section for “Strange News,” an echo of the spirit of “Odd News” on Yahoo.

The site notably also contains a section called “Build Your Own Newscast,” where users can select and order from 20 top stories from the day and 18 other packages. This creates the capacity for viewers to see a newscast online that is far different from what is available from either the evening more morning news, and far larger. And there is a substantial section where users can download programming for podcast listening, PDAs and MP3s.

The left rail of the new site also contains an “Only on the Web” feature in which CBS News correspondents generate large amounts of video content that is unique, not “repurposed” from television.

Uniquely among the networks and most other sites, CBSNews.com also contains CBS Public Eye, an effort launched after Kramer’s arrival to allow consumers to react to, talk about, criticize and even interact directly with CBS news officials. More than a page, this is a site within a site. It includes essays from outside contributors, comments from viewers, responses by CBS journalists, and blogs by authors from Public Eye.

It is probably the most serious attempt at transparency and dialogue we saw in our sample. It adds a dimension to the CBS approach that makes it, along with one local newspaper we monitored, the most significant attempt to create a sense of a news organization offering a distinct product with a different personality online, rather than just a news source that is involves multimedia and constant updating. Yet Public Eye also feels like a work in progress, and the visitor senses that in a year or two it may be quite different, particularly if blogs begin to fade or evolve as a new dimension of the Web.