Where’s the video?

What distinguishes a TV news website from a newspaper or magazine site? If you said video, think again. According to Scott Woelfel of Armchair Media, news sites still haven’t really embraced video “even though it’s a differentiator.”

At the RTDNA convention in Las Vegas this week Woelfel ran a fascinating exercise, calling up the home pages of big national news sites (with their identities hidden) and challenging the audience to identify which ones were broadcast. The fact is, they all looked a lot alike, featuring big photos in a scrolling slide show on the left with headline links on the right. Compare the CBS News site (above) to the Washington Post (below) and the point is hard to miss. Only CNN.com had an obvious video player on its home page.

Does this matter? “In a YouTube environment, where younger users are trained to search for video, this is [significant],” Woelfel says, urging TV newsrooms to put video front and center on their websites. “Separate yourself from newspapers and other television sites because they are simply not doing the job.”

That said, Woefel noted that home page design is less important than it used to be, because more users are finding information via search and referral rather than browsing. So what may matter more is featuring video prominently on inside pages, which the CBS site does.

A few other notes from Woelfel’s public critique of some local TV sites:

• Keep navigation simple and clean, with 5-6 tabs at most. The double-stacked top nav bar at KY3.com, for example, is much too cluttered. Use topical terms that your audience understands, like “local news,” “weather,” and “sports,” instead of labels. One site included a tab for “features,” which Woelfel dismissed as “a newsroom term that doesn’t mean anything to people.”
• Avoid using button images for news links that are the same size and style as ads, as the KSPR.com site does. “People have trained themselves to ignore them,” Woelfel says.
• Make sure links are descriptive so people who click them know what they’re going to get. How long should they be? Woelfel said Google’s “sponsored links” on the right side of its search pages are a good guide. “That’s the length you want to get people to click.”

One final word about video: Yes, you want it on your home page but please, please don’t make it play automatically. People checking the news at work don’t want your pre-roll ad blasting out of their cubicle.

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