On this day, Friday November 6th 2009, the New York Times, nytimes.com, and latimes.com all have front-page stories focusing on yesterday’s shootings at Fort Hood, Texas. Since it is about 14-16 hours older than its constantly refreshed electronic brethren, the print NYT has articles that focus more on the “what” or the straight-up facts of what happened, identifying basic things like who the suspected shooter was and those who were injured or killed. Over the course of the day, both websites wrote and posted stories that explored the story deeper, with stories focusing on the motives and biography of the shooter, and also about the gunman (technically gunwoman) who ended up shooting the suspect. Nytimes.com even has a sort of motion graphic slideshow that diagrams how the entire incident went down. The print version dedicates considerable front-page space to the story—undeniably the biggest national news item of the day, perhaps even the biggest piece of international news—including two articles and the standard one-photo-above-the-fold. The online NYT dedicates even more space to the story, as there is an entire front-and-center section of the homepage that is dedicated exclusively to stories about the Fort Hood shooting. Because there is less of a focus on national news at the LA Times and more of a focus on local news, there is only one Fort Hood story on the front page, and the main photograph is actually focused on “the peril of Africa’s elephants.”
It is obvious that the LA Times has far more local news and pictures on their website than the New York Times, which in fact has both a U.S. and a Global edition, with the Global edition as its default. There are far more stories being put on nytimes.com, so the headlines are all in itty-bitty text, with no room for any pictures to be put alongside. For instance, Latimes.com has three stories (with three pictures) about the Los Angeles Lakers, who are currently about a week into the very long NBA regular season, and Nytimes.com has only one mention of the Yankees just a couple days after they won their first World Series in nearly a decade, and it’s buried way down underneath the Book Review. The LA Times even has features on high school football games in the area, while nytimes.com has different sections that feature news from the different continents. There is also a much larger emphasis on entertainment with latimes.com, as there is an entertainment sidebar up at the very top of the website, and the current most-viewed story is not about Fort Hood but instead about Michael Jackson.
The LA Times has given more attention to a clean and uncluttered design, with photographs commanding the front and center of article pages, while nytimes.com sticks thumbnails in the sidebar, requiring the reader to click on it in order to view a full-size image. Even though it has a considerably smaller audience, this sleek design makes latimes.com a far more appealing website, in my opinion.
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