First Impressions

Looking back to the first day of class, when I drew the Huffington Post as my news source to track, I didn’t really know what to expect. Though it may not have been the best choice journalistically speaking, my news sources up to this point have been rather uniform. I am a faithful New York Times reader, I listen to the occasional news podcast, and I will sometimes watch a random news clip or two if they pop into my YouTube feed.

All of that to say, when I first set out on my news tracking assignment, I quickly realized how much I had been missing out on by not expanding my horizons earlier. My initial impression of the Huffington Post site was that it had a nice visual appeal. A clean, white background with the occasional pop of vibrant colors drew my eyes in, eager for more. Upon further exploration, however, my eyes quickly went from eager to overwhelmed.  The homepage had a nice array of stories with everything from breaking world news to pop-culture, but there were simply too many options to click on. The site had entirely too many links and stories to take in a glance. The major breaking stories were of course more prominent than the rest of the articles, but beyond those, it seemed almost impossible to find what you were looking for.The initial jungle nature of the page was improved though once I chose to start looking through the news by specific categories.

Beyond the overwhelming layout, I found the Huffington Post to be a rather pleasant site to explore. I enjoyed their variety of news pieces. The site also had a nice video feature where it played the most prominent news-clip videos in the bottom right corner of the screen on mute. In the past, I had found this sort of feature distracting and annoying on certain websites, but I found the clip to be non-abrasive and actually enticing enough that I ended up watching the whole thing.

Overall, I have found the Huffington Post to be a pleasant experience thus far, and I look forward to tracking its movements for the rest of the semester to come.