Ruby Olivia Potter

 

ro_potter10@yahoo.com

 

LIS 458

 

9/12/14

 

News

 

The New York Times

 

• What is the title and URL of the Web page?

The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/

 

• Evaluation of Web Design

 

a. Is the design generally pleasing or appealing? Is there a good balance between content and blank space?-No, it is not a appealing design because there is not a good balance between the content and blank space making it very crowed and easy to overlook a specific article.  

 

b. Is there enough contrast between the color of the text and the background so that the text is easily readable?-Yes, there is a good contrast between the text color, black, and the background color, white, making it easy to read in relation to the issue of contrast .

 

c. Are the colors and graphic design appropriate for the content and not too busy to be distracting?- The colors are appropriate, black words on a while background, but the font styles and sizes are not consistent from one article to the next. This makes it distracting and hard to distinguish between which titles go with which articles because the text styles and sizes are all jumbled up together. While all the graphics on the page seem to go with specific articles there is an ad for POLO and Ralph Lauren that seems to have no place on the page as it is the only ad on the whole page and makes the whole thing look off-kilter.  

 

d. Is the Web page easily navigable, that is, is it structured so that there is a menu at the top or left to allow ease of navigation within the page or to other pages within the Web site?- The menu is at the top and includes links to World, U.S., Politics, New York, Business, Opinion, Technology, Science, Health, Sports, Arts, Style, Dining, Home, Travel, Magazine, and Real Estate news as well as a link to view it all at once.   

 

• Evaluation of Content

 

a.Currency – Is there a date created or updated on the Web page and is it current or appropriate?- The only date on this section of the Web page is a copyright date for 2014 so yes the information is current and up to date. 

 

b. Authority – Is the author/creator of the Web page named and is that person a scholar or expert?  (you can search for the author in Google as a bound phrase “first name * last name”)- The only name found, on the help page of the New York Times Web page, is Margaret Sullivan, the public editor and  representative of the readers. Yes, she is an expert in this field. As stated in the Public Editors Journal on the New York Times Web page “Margaret Sullivan is the fifth public editor appointed by The New York Times. She writes about the Times and its journalism in a frequent blog – the Public Editor’s Journal — and in a twice-monthly print column in the Sunday Review section. The public editor’s office also handles questions and comments from readers and investigates matters of journalistic integrity. The public editor works independently, outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper; her opinions are her own. Ms. Sullivan was editor and vice president of The Buffalo News before being named as Times public editor in September 2012. She was the first woman to serve as the editor and as the managing editor of The News, after working as a reporter and columnist there. As editor, Ms. Sullivan focused the paper’s reporting on poverty, economic development and inequities in public education, and established its first investigative team. Ms. Sullivan was appointed to the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2011 and has been a juror four times, serving as the chairwoman of the distinguished commentary jury in 2006. She was elected twice as a director of the American Society of News Editors and has led its First Amendment committee. A native of Lackawanna, N.Y., Ms. Sullivan is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she is a member of its Hall of Achievement.”

 

c. Reliability – Is the domain .edu or .gov or .mil (most reliable), .net or .org (depends on organization), or .com (least reliable)?  Is the content accurate and objective/unbiased?- The domain is the least reliable form, a .com. Since the Web pages is both a .com and a news source Web page the content is going to be biased and incomplete in many aspects. The information reported may, in and of itself, be complete but this does not mean it is the whole story of what is really going on as the news reports on the stories they want to have heard about while ignoring the stories they do not want the public to hear. So while the content may be accurate and objective it can also be biased reporting.      

 

d. Scope – Is the information complete? Is it basic or advanced? Who is the intended audience?-yes the information is complete, as it covers all the facts that have been presented for each topic. As the scope covers seventeen topics and each topic is intended for a different audience the scope is either basic or advanced based upon the intended audience. As the information can be assessed online, the intended audience for the overall Web page is anyone with the ability to assess the information with each article tailored to a specific part of the audience.  

 

• Web Analytics

 

a. Copy and paste the Web page URL into link checker at http://validator.w3.org/checklink Are there any broken links? Yes, there are 131 broken links. 8  are due to the robots exclusion rules, 2 are pointing to a broken URI fragment, 118 are temporary redirect links, 2 are pointing to a “see other” resource, and 1 that the server cannot process for some unknown reason. 

 

b. Copy and paste the Web page URL into http://www.alexa.com/ What information is available about the Web page? How popular it is, how engaged its visitors are, who visits the site, where the visitors come from, what sites link to the site, what sites are related to the site, where visitors go while on the site, how fast does the site load, and were more information can be found about the site.  

 

c. How many other Web pages link to this page? (using Google, type in “link:” then paste the Web URL with no space after the colon) Google shows about 3,610 results. One being KIKO at kiko.com and another being a PBS article at  http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/04/publishers-mobile-first-is-too-slow/