The Evolving Newsroom

Speaking of the need for news organisations to find and distribute stories out where people naturally congregate online, CNN is taking a leap along that pathway by allowing its video to be embedded.

ReadWriteWeb writes:

With this, CNN is following a growing trend among news organizations like MSNBC, FoxNews, and CBS. Judging from the wording of the announcement, CNN is clearly hoping to see some of its clips go viral, and with the political season in the U.S. heating up in the run-up to the November election, they might just have chosen the right time to enable this feature.

The embeddable viewer is pretty standard and currently only allows playing one single clip at 384x216. We weren't able to determine if CNN is restricting this service by geography, but at least our Canadian friends have reported that they could play play the embedded videos without a problem.

Well, let's see.



Seems to work okay in this part of the world. The embed button is pretty small - tucked away at bottom right of the media player - and it might have been an idea to highlight it YouTube style until the idea took off.

But it works and the idea to allow users to embed video on their blogs is a great one.

Just wish they'd add crumb trails to their site. I clicked on a Business story and tried in vain to navigate back to the homepage by clicking on Home. Eventually realised I was now in CNN Money and had to use a CNN.com button at the other end of the navigation bar to get back.

Interesting to see that US blogsite Huffington Post is branching out into local news (via ReadWriteWeb).

Initially, the site will launch an edited news aggregation site (similar to the main Huffington Post web site) localized for the US metro area around Chicago, Illinois. The site will be managed by a single editor to start. "We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began," Arianna Huffington said to [Guardian News & Media's internal Future of Journalism] conference attendees.

Launched three years ago in May of 2005 as a politics-focused celebrity group blog, the Huffington Post has since grown up -- a lot. It added original reporting in November 2006, has taken $10 million in venture financing over 2 rounds, has expanded beyond politics to cover media, business, the environment, and other hot button issues, and is the most linked to blog on the web according to Technorati. Now HuffPo wants to taken on local newspapers.

That makes sense given that analysts have predicted that local ad spending will jump 48% this year to $12.6 billion. The majority of those ads will be search advertising, but clearly, local information is hot with consumers. We've written about the rise of hyperlocal information on ReadWriteWeb before -- Huffington and company are seeking to take advantage of this trend. They want to turn the Huffington Post into a national, virtual newspaper group -- think Gannett or McClatchy but completely online.

And that makes sense, too. A comScore study that we reported on in March revealed that 38% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 are unlikely to read a physical newspaper during a typical week, but non-news readers are still voracious consumers of news. They just get their news online.