News moves fast in 2011, almost as fast as the websites that cover it. What it also reveals is that not all digital media is equal.
TheWrap spent one mind-numbing day on Jan. 24 looking at the world's most-trafficked news homepages -- including the New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN, Drudge Report and Gawker -- to see how they handled big stories (suicide bomber in Moscow, ballot controversy in Chicago with Rahm Emanuel, Tuesday's early-morning Oscar nominations) over 24 hours.
Here's what we found:
The L.A. Times is slow. The Washington Post needs a redesign. Huffpo kicks ass on reader engagement. And when it comes to news, Gawker is an also-ran.
The homepages of major news sites have become the agenda-setting slates that newspaper front pages used to be. And if Monday is any indication of the future, CNN is set, the New York Times is in good shape, and the Huffington Post, Washington Post and Gawker could use more than a little work.
But Huffpo gets mountains of commenters when compared to the Times (any of them).
As far as speed, the sites were on par or even ahead of cable news networks -- not surprisingly, CNN led the way). But they appeared to struggle with balancing breaking news with planned features, and struggled to pin down the exact number of casualties in Moscow, each reporting (was it 29? 31? 35?) different death tolls on a live, moving story.
Drudge Report
What they did: Drudge was the first, at 9 a.m. ET, to report the news of the suicide bomb attack in Moscow -- with a small line above its homepage “fold," though the site kept its lead story about the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers Super Bowl berths at the top of the page. Drudge eventually swapped it out with a large headline -- “SUICIDE BOMBER ATTACKS MOSCOW AIRPORT” -- linking to a Reuters report. Shortly before 10, Drudge updated the headline to include the death toll “31+ DEAD” and switched to the preferred red breaking news font.
Drudge was the last (at 1:30 p.m.) among the major news sites (including Gawker) to have the Rahm Emanuel story -- but it was the first to use it to displace the Moscow blast at the top of its homepage.
How they did: As a near-pure news aggregator, Drudge should have a speed advantage over big-trafficked competitors that have to report, produce and format breaking news stories. But the fact that Drudge was late on Emanuel -- a story that should be in Drudge's right-leaning wheelhouse -- shows that's not always the case. Maybe he went to the bathroom.
GRADE: B+
The New York Times
What they did: The Times published the Associated Press version of the Moscow story at about 9:20 a.m.,
