Yahoo News Overwhelmingly Shallow
January 3, 2009 by Jason Bean
Filed under Celebrities, Movies & Television, Social Networking
First let me say a huge statement of condolences to the Travolta family on the loss of their 16-yr old son, Jett Travolta. I can’t even comprehend the loss that must be felt and grief that’s being experienced right now by John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston.
The proliferation of news coverage about this is somewhat amazing to me. As you can see from the screen capture of the headline interface on my Yahoo! Mail this morning, 4 of the 6 headlines are about Jett’s death. Two from the Associated Press and two from E! Online. I know I can customize my news features but I think Yahoo would be better served by not duplicating stories in this view, but then branching out to other coverage of news stories after the reader clicks on the initial link they’re interested.
By doing this Yahoo would then present the reader with 6 options of interest and spread their probability of hitting something the reader was interested. In this case, if I’m not interested in reading about this story, I only have two other options for getting directed into Yahoo’s broader Entertainment news coverage.
It’s also depressing in this new year that out of the 6 headlines in entertainment news this morning that I see, all but one is about death, and the 6th is about the Grateful Dead.
