Not Flashy Enough
With the news reaching out to the youth, many studies have been conducted to find out what is it that the youth want to know. With a few minor details, it turns out teens are very much alike to adults when it comes to news and what grabs their attention. World news, national, local, business, financial, and entertainment are all sections of the news that youth look at. But if you want to gear something to particular viewership, it’s all about one thing: presentation, and that’s what ourworldtv.tv seems to lacking in some areas.
It all comes back to the old saying, “Know your audience.” With the studies that have been made, there’s no doubt that the media industry is trying to know its youth audience. Studies have shown that youth like their news to be bold, short, and direct to the point. This can often mean, as seen on many major news websites such as cnn.com or nytimes.com, as having the headline in bold lettering, a two or three sentence summary of the story, and a decent-sized picture to give the reader a visual. A video or photo gallery of a story would be really good also. But on ourworldtv.tv there are a number of things missing there to promote the shows and music artists on the site.
The site’s initial page is good with the video presentation. It’s innovative, bold, and direct. But once you go inside the site, there’s no way back to it. Having a picture of the host in different poses is a good idea for the website I think, and one page even takes you to her own site featuring a video of her, but a few of the pages have low-resolution pictures of her. At the very least the pictures should be medium-resolution. On the page promoting the show “Our World,” the text invites the viewer to watch the pilot episode. Where is that pilot episode? How come there isn’t a link to it? I couldn’t find it. On the music page there are links to a few artists’ Myspace page, which is cool, but personally I think a sample of their music, such as the chorus or the hook of the songs playing in the background on the site would have enhanced the experience. The rest of the pages’ content are decent enough.
All in all, this site could use some excitement, something to give it some life and make it bounce off the screen. What’s already online is a good starting point. Enhancing it shouldn’t be that big of a sweat.
October 26, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Good suggestions. You and many of your classmates are very much in sync on OurWorld’s approach. Will be curious to know what approach to a news format would work best to better engage you.