Read all about it; AOL goes tabloid “above the fold”
Posted July 16, 2008 at 11:29 AM by Renay San Miguel
Section: Tech News, Web, Websites
“Pics show beauty topless, kissing married TV star”.. “Reality show couple calls it quits”... “Star is skin and bones on red carpet”...or if you don’t like that anorexically-inclined headline, try “Skinny actress frumpy in white”... “One busy, hot mama tells how to get in shape quickly”...
At 10:30 p.m. PST on July 15, 2008 - the end of a day that saw more stomach-churning stock market volatility, more violent death in Iraq and Afghanistan and closer poll results in the presidential race - the front page of AOL showed some, shall we say, interesting priorities among those who are making the news judgment calls and authorizing the headlines at this major portal.
Not that Yahoo! or MSN, viewed at the same time, were in danger of being confused with PBS’s “Newshour with Jim Lehrer.“ It’s just that AOL seemed to be taking most of its news cues lately from its sister entertainment/celebrity gossip website TMZ.com.
A quick review of AOL, Yahoo! and MSN’s non-customized, above-the-fold layouts and headlines - that is, everything that shows up on your computer screen before you scroll down, the way a newspaper is presented on a newsstand - showed few substantial, “hard” news items and a lot of easy-to-tease, easy-to-write-snarky-headline fodder that would be right at home on the 11 p.m. news in tabloid-heavy TV markets like Los Angeles or New York. Yet AOL seemed to go the extra mile in playing up the salacious and sleazy. One notices a suspicious emphasis on anorexic actresses, celebrity breakups, links to semi-nude photos of actresses in trouble and, of course, Miley Cyrus.
Granted, Yahoo!‘s largest-font headline on its home page was “Habits that Scare Men Away,“ with an accompanying picture of a very worried woman with an equally pensive man in soft focus behind her. “Celebrity Wedding Songs” await the curious at MSN’s largest above-the-fold headline, which pops up after the tease for a Newsweek story about an American student charged in an Italian murder case cycles through the rotation. And both AOL and Yahoo! played up video and photos of a Central Casting-cute koala bear that survived a head-on collision in Australia. It’s true that all of the websites have access to content partners/subsidiaries that offer financial and consumer news, and you see a smattering of those items scattered across the pages. And yes, headlines - like video snippets on your local news - are chosen to stop you in your digital tracks, get you to click on links, stay a while and get caught in the gooey stickiness of these pages so metrics can be measured and advertising rates can be charged. You have to get them in the tent, etc. etc. I’m aware of the bottom-line basics of the portal business, and that it is, indeed a business. And I know that drilling down beyond the front pages of AOL, Yahoo! and MSN will get you more in-depth news aggregations from a variety of credible partners.
Yet there is this perception that newspapers, local TV and broadcast networks are losing viewers because of the wider range of choices presented to news consumers, with the Internet supreme among those choices. Readers are looking for better, more serious news content, and providing them with breathless, “Access Hollywood”-style coverage of gossip - or true crime, quirky video or other News of the Weird - betrays a cynical view of what a supposedly-younger and hipper web audience wants to see.
These are, after all, the Front Pages of the digital age. Why turn them into the worst that mainstream media is already offering?