I went to three South African online news websites and analyzed each using the following basic structure:
- Ownership
- Target market
- Visuals (pictures and videos)
- Web structure and placement of stories and adverts.
These are the websites:
Eye Witness News
EWN is being owned by Primedia and most journalists who contribute stories are from Talkradio 702. Adverts are less as there is more news content. The news content is being updated on a regular basis as the news bulletins that were read on air are uploaded on hourly as audio. One notable thing about the site is that there is one big picture box. On the right side of it; there are story headlines (written in a small black font),of which when you put the curser near them, the picture of the story is displayed inside box. As you scroll down, there is a slug- tag box of each story, which enables you to locate any story about any person or organization that you want.
Included in the site are regular update of the day’s weather, monthly features, business and traffic.
SABC News
The second site is under the ownership of the public broadcaster, SABC. Given that the SABC has three Television stations and various number radio stations, the sites has almost a balance in articles ,video, picture and audio, but strangely they don’t update their site’s content on an hourly basis like Primedia’s EWN.
The site’s masthead is placed bellow advert and top news bar, to me it suggest a commercial online news trend. The same as EWN, there is one big box (written in a big blue font which matches the site’s colour) but for a single lead story.
The news content is placed based on an important order because the lead story is singularly placed at the top below the site’s masthead and the top bar menu. There’s also regular update of the day’s weather, monthly features and business. Traffic is not included in the site.
IOL News
With regard to IOL, The masthead of the site is also placed bellow an advert and top news bar. Given the site’s other web content link on the top, IOL News did not centralize its content to one site. But has divided its content to different sites, such as IOL Travel and so on.
The same as Primedia’s EWN, there is a box and on the right side of it, there are a list of story headlines (written in a small black font), of which when you put the curser near it the picture of the story is displayed in the box. The content is regularly updated on mostly a half an hour basis. Although most articles are complimented by pictures, the site lacks audio and video material.
All these three news sites have social media networks links, which link you to their pages.
Link of examples of content:
- SABC (video) : http://www.sabc.co.za/news/f1/aa3218804a1b0d499dcafdec1ef4126a/State-of-the-Nation-Address-2012-20120209
- EWN (audio): http://www.ewn.co.za/Multimedia.aspx
- IOL (Picture Article): http://www.iol.co.za/
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