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Wednesday, May 11, 2005
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The new color scheme of the News Sentinel's KnoxNews
is cool-for-summer, but the redesigned home page takes forever to load on my antiquated home
dial-up connection, which is not cool. I'll just bookmark Michael Silence, Georgiana Vines and Sam Venable instead.
Besides, that home page only delivers
headlines, not story summaries. It's hardly worth the wait, compared to various alternatives in the area. You
do get a large Flash slide show, just in case you haven't seen enough
pictures of Kenny Chesney and Renee Zellweger. And you get big
animated ads, in case you haven't seen enough of those on TV.
Those headline links also do continue
to use the shortest line of the newspaper's two-line headlines, even
when that deck is almost free of information. For example, which of
these two lines tells you what the story is about? "Strong, Silent and Steadfast" or "Women in Black mark 3rd year of marching for Middle East peace."
Anyhow, I think I know what the company is trying to accomplish with this
redesign. If it really is a subtle attempt to get me to
re-subscribe to the printed newspaper, it might just work.
But there's competition: Topix.net delivers News Sentinel summaries (and more),
with a Knoxville news feed aggregating TV and newspaper stories that
mention the city (or Johnny). In case you don't get to read the news daily,
it keeps more than a month of story summaries available, even after the
full versions have expired into the knoxnews.com archives.
I had to go back to check, but the News Sentinel's E.W. Scripps is not one of the news conglomerates that bought into Topix earlier this year. I wonder how long it will take for them to block the feed somehow.
3:00:03 PM 
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© Copyright
2008
Bob Stepno.
Last update:
7/19/08; 1:05:28 PM.
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