News eZines vs. News Blogs

The news eZine I’m using for this post is www.talkcon.com and the news blog I’m using is www.worldblog.msnbc.msn.com.

These two websites are very different. Talkcon is an eZine and is laid out like one. It has different sections of news that you can click on, like Credit Crisis, Current Events, U.S. Issues, etc. If you click on any of those links, articles come up about the topic you picked. The articles are written as if you were reading a newspaper article. The articles I read weren’t opinionated and didn’t seem like someone was just writing about how they feel about a topic. It was a news article.

WorldBlog has a very different look than Talkcon does. It’s powered by NBC so there is more money for a better website, but this website is a news blog, not a news eZine. On this page there a various articles which can be discussed by viewers. The articles range from China’s Economic Model, to a Taliban Hostage begging for help, to a German school shooting. There are lots of world news topics that can be discussed compared to Talkcon that just had the articles and no discussion took place.

I feel that the WorldBlog was more professional and effective. Just the look of it was more professional. Like I mentioned, it’s powered by NBC which is a very big news company and is very professional. The WorldBlog was also a lot easier to find on the internet. I just typed in ‘world news blog’ into Google and that was the first option whereas finding Talkcon took a lot more searching. I thought Talkcon was easier to read only because it had different sections or topics you could click on and read about and WorldBlog didn’t. On WorldBlog you just had to keep scrolling down to view the different stories.

I think both websites covered the same type of stories, but WorldBlog defiantly had a greater amount of articles to read as compared to Talkcon. I felt that both websites were credible and trustworthy, but if I had to choose one over the other, I would choose WorldBlog because it had much more information and is powered by NBC which is a very credible source.

Before doing this assignment, I would said that I felt that a print newspaper would be more credible than a news blog. After doing this assignment, I felt that the news blog I chose was more credible than the eZine that I chose. In the end, I would choose a print newspaper over both a news blog and a news eZine because I feel that is the most credible source.

I would rate this research as a 4 – somewhat supports my thesis because coming into this I had a negative outlook on news blogs, but WorldBlog changed my outlook somewhat on news blogs. However, I still think print newspapers are the most credible and do not want to change my thesis.