Time.com
www.time.com Accessed Nov 5 2008
Time Magazine is a daily news magazine owned by CNN with national circulation. It covers politics, U.S. News, international news, business, health, entertainment, and travel. Not only does the site have its own content, but it features a section that focuses on the magazine itself, and allows users to search articles and editions worldwide.
Extent of Community Involvement: Time.com and Time Magazine reach a large number of people, which could make it very difficult to field a lot of user input. However, Time has done a good job of including the public in a variety of ways. While straight news stories are not able to be commented on, blogs are commentable. Also, Time features a People section, in which it showcases celebrities and entertainers, who answer readers' questions. The ability to search Time's magazine articles on the site allows readers to read the magazine online, and there are multiple other ways that the site includes the community, including polls and top story lists. The polls are a neat feature, because they allow a user to see the results from separate states and regions. There was huge community feedback (7708 responses by 2 in the afternoon) on the Nov. 5 poll, “What will you miss least about the campaign?” The blogs in the World Section (focusing on China and the Middle East) all had okay feedback, somewhere in the range of five to twenty comments per blog. The election blogs all had multiple comments, some in the seventies. Because the Time.com writers do not come from one separate area, there are no community blogs, but the organization has pulled bloggers from places it features, such as the China and Middle Eastern blogs. Grade: B
Format of Stories: Time.com not only features traditional written stories, but videos and photos as well. The election focus section includes many links to photo stories (White House Photo Blog), videos (“Scenes from the Obama victory rally”), and blogs (Swampland) that are related to the election. The site does a good job of linking its content, including linking stories that are related. The site itself also has a designated photos section, with features like “Pictures of the Week,” “Today in Pictures,” and “Pictures of the Year.” The Photos section also includes a Graphics section, which showcases interactive graphics, such as poll results, image maps, and tag word clouds. My favorite entry from the Graphics section is “Bush's Speech, Word by Word,” which breaks down George W. Bush's last State of the Union address into words, and then reports the frequency of those words. Grade: A
Updates: The Time site is updated multiple times throughout the day. Within an hour of my viewing the site, the lead story had changed on the front page. Despite there being a large front-page feature about the election, there is also a list near to the top of the page of the most recent headlines. In this manner, Time can keep its lead story, but also provide links to other important stories. The list of lead headlines also has a “Last Updated” tag, which proves when the site has last been updated with new stories. In the election section, the paper had a live update blog on election night. The presence of the writers on the site leaves no doubt that the site is an important part of Time's presence to the general public. Grade: A
Editorial System:
Time's editorial staff is difficult to find on the site, and can be reached through the media kit section. (http://www.time.com/time/mediakit/1/us/timemagazine/press/bios/index.html) The organization has a number of editors-at-large, senior editors, writers, correspondents, and managerial staff. There is evidence of an advanced editorial hierarchy due to the number and categorization of the staff into departments. With such a large circulation and amount of content, the job could not be completed with any less than what they list as publication staff. Time.com has its own editorial staff, including an executive producer, video and media editor, and multiple Internet-only columnists. Grade: A
Blogs:
Time.com features multiple blogs. The site's designated blog section has a number of different blog categories, including U.S., World, Entertainment, Business and Technology, and Photos. One of the top blogs is Nerd World, which is a self-proclaimed “geek culture” blog. There are also two large blogs in the World section that cover China and the Middle East. Time has designated staff to write these blogs, but there are few, if any, blogs for the writers. Due to the nature of the organization, I didn't expect there to be blogs for individual writers, because there are so many writers. The blogs appear to be well-populated with commenters. The number and caliber of the blogs adds to Time's credible image-- as a publication they were considered credible before the Internet, but they have grasped the conversational writing and personal feel of blogs as an online presence, thus giving them an edge on connecting with the consumer and perpetuating their credibility through the site. Grade: A
Final Thoughts:
Time has been around since 1923, and has garnered a huge reader base and circulation area since then. With such a wide variety of readers to reach, the publication has done well in its move to the Internet. Plenty of blogs, a steady editorial base, and the use of computers and technology to for multimedia stories allows Time to show its credibility to its large and varied readership. Final Grade: A