I followed The Huffington Post on Twitter for over a year. When they would pop up on my timeline, it was some non-news opinion story or it was similar to the lists that Buzzfeed is so well-known for now. In short, their Twitter account did not fall too far from the desktop tree.
The first thing that's shown at www.huffingtonpost.com on desktop is this huge photo:
At this point, The Huffington Post has done a pretty good job of informing you of what you should know about the topic of the week: Ebola. The large photo with the caption is definitely an attention grabber which will navigate your eyes to the various relevant headlines below. Although the headlines resemble a telegraph, they provide a quick summary of the story. The only downside to this is that you have to take the writers' word for what the headlines mean. Keep in mind that these stories are written by people who work at The Huffington Post. From what I understand, they are not politically unbiased. This can show through in some of the stories.One question comes to mind when looking at this front page: Where are the details? We've discussed in class how people will read the headline only and not bother to click on the link to the article. At Google News, the headlines are there but so are the first few words of an article. These allow the reader to make their minds up about an article with the knowledge of more than just the headline. Google News gives us more information because it is more of a collector of news articles as opposed to a creator of them.Take a look at the Google News front page of their website:
The first page at Google News has a different layout which has a desktop feel to it; in addition to the news articles written by a variety of news sources, you have other types of updates such as the weather or sports game outcomes. The interesting here are the details that Google News provides under their headlines. These "sneak peeks" provide enough details to grab the users attention. All of this information at your disposal allows you to linger longer and hopefully go exploring down that "bunny hole" of reading news article after news article, increasing page views for the various news outlets.In conclusion, The Huffington Post as compared to Google News, has less information on their front page that the user can immediately choose to read and with not as much diversity in ideas. This being because most articles are created by people who work for them whereas Google takes articles from the various reputable news outlets on the Internet. Google News is the better news aggregator because they offer various points of view with enough details under the headline to entice the reader to click on the article. The Huffington Post mainly gives you their take on the news and does not allow for exploration of articles because they tell you everything up front.