Month: February 2014
Post #2, Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is a news site that features stories on everything from politics and entertainment to health features and technology reviews. It was founded in the spring of 2005 by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Jonah Peretti. Huffington, whom the site is named after, serves as the editor and chief.
Much of the content on the Huffington Post is blog-based, and more than 1,600 people serve as unpaid writers who contribute stories. The Huffington Post’s homepage (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/) features a number of headlines on top news stories nationally and worldwide, in addition to popular blogs and opinion pieces from writers.
While the news stories posted on the front page often include a photo relating to the story, the opinion and blog pieces feature a small headshot of the writer. Additionally, below each headline or short teaser paragraph is a link to the comments posted by readers. Reader comments are very popular on Huffington Post stories. For example, a recent article posted with the headline “Obama Slams Fox News In Bill O’Reilly Interview” garnered over 1,000 comments. (Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/02/bill-oreilly-obama-interview_n_4702120.html#comments)
Huffington Post stories are also commonly shared on social media. The same Obama piece features a note at the top claiming that over 20,000 people had “liked” the story on Facebook.
AOL purchased The Huffington Post in 2011 for $315 million. The purchase created the Huffington Post Media Group, which introduced additional versions of the site in countries such as France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Japan. Additionally, Huffington, a weekly digital magazine featuring articles and multimedia content, was first offered in 2012.
According to Alexa.com, a web information company, The Huffington Post ranks 20th in the United States in popularity and 72nd globally.
Sources:
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/huffingtonpost.com
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1192975/The-Huffington-Post
Post #1, Introduction
My name is Kelsey Knoche and I am a junior Broadcast Journalism major here at the University of Maryland. I am from Northern Virginia (Annandale) and have lived in the D.C. area my entire life.
I don’t have any extensive journalism experience as of now, but am planning to intern at ESPN980 this summer. Since I came to Maryland I’ve worked as a Student Assistant for the men’s basketball team where I am in charge of a number of things, from the planning of recruiting visits to our summer camps. I have really enjoyed the experience and it’s definitely made me interested in working in a college athletic department after graduation. Despite majoring in a somewhat specific field, I’m really not incredibly interested in being a journalist when I graduate. I would, however, be interested in working for an athletic team’s media relations office, so some of the skills I’ve learned and classes I’ve taken will definitely be useful should I pursue that field.
I have experience using both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign. I used both quite a bit in high school when I worked on my school’s newspaper and we also spent a few weeks focusing on Photoshop in JOUR203 (Introduction to Multimedia Skills). I’m very interested in social media, especially Twitter, and have used it a lot in both my personal and academic life. Twitter is now my main avenue for hearing about news stories, especially breaking news, and I think it’s really become such an interesting part of journalism.
As of now, I do not have any real experience with HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver of WordPress so I am looking forward to learning more about them in addition to some of the online interactive tools we are planning on covering. I think the class will be very interesting and informative and I am looking forward to this semester!
Kelsey Knoche 