Dear CNN, I Hate Your New Homepage. Love, Leah - Media Meditation #5

A few weeks ago, the "New" CNN was born. I don't know what mother CNN was on when she was pregnant, but the "New" CNN did not come out pretty. I unfortunately did not foresee this change coming so I do not have a screen shot of what the old CNN looked like. The old CNN had the most important story on the left side of the screen first with a photo and then the first paragraph and the viewer would click to read more. On the right were links to other news stories. Below is a screen shot of the "New" CNN:



The most important story is still located on the left, however, it used to be the only photo so it would stand out. Now, it competes with a video of a feature story and an advertisement. If you look closely you can even see that the advertisement on the right is bigger than the most important news story! I was furious the first time I saw the "New" CNN. I would see television commercials touting how great the "New" CNN is, yeah, right. Now, instead of my eye being drawn to the big story of the moment, I'm seeing fluffy feature pieces and advertisements for getting an online degree.

This is an example of both an aesthetic shift and an economic shift -- hyper commercialism. This is an aesthetic shift because they were trying to make their website more attractive to visitors by appealing to the limbic brain with more pictures and videos. This new makeover (or under?) blurs the lines between news and entertainment. The economic shift shows the hyper commercialism blatant in the fact that the advertisement is larger than the most important news story! CNN clearly gets more advertising dollars because their advertisers get more room and impression than they did on the old CNN. The Media and Society book says, "It appears that, rather than transporting information, the internet has become a 'virtual mall,' with corporations trying new ways to sell us all sorts of products." (pg. 13) Even our news source is trying to sell to us!