USA Today Critique

USA Today is an online news source that comes to my mind that also is a major national print publication. USA Today is sent to many homes across the United States, and also with technology today can be read online too. To be completely honest, I believe that online reading is so much easier than print, but it also has negative aspects of it as well.

While looking through the homepage of USAToday.com they seem to categorize the news by most popular and the top news. A positive part of online reading compared to print news is that many online media reading sources use “info. Snacking.” They use the title that links you to the article, therefore the reader does not have to read everything, but pick and choose what interests them. USA Today also uses a variety of multimedia to help cover all of the interesting articles. They use videos and different links that will give more information to cover that article. When reading the USA Today print at home, this seems to be a problem. Print media can only be viewed from what the newspaper has chosen to be in the . Clicking to other links is obviously not going to be able to happen in a print media.

Personally, I believe that watching videos and being able to link to other material is very resourceful and helpful. Sometimes hearing something is easier to understand than reading something. For an example, the video showing the Fargo flood is more meaningful to watch because you actually can see what these people are going through. Sometimes writers can have a hard time describing something, such as a disaster in words; therefore by having online media, they can do both.

I also believe that online sourcing is easier and more convenient. USA Today uses RSS, which allows an email to be sent of the latest news updates. This is very beneficial because the reader does not have to visit the website every time and can get the news right to their own email. This can not happen whenever your reading the newspaper.

Don’t get me wrong I do believe sometimes online media can be overwhelming, sometimes a video will not work, or words will not display on the computer screen. Other times they have so much in archives and in their present news, that you can find yourself getting lost in the site. While reading a newspaper this would not happen and it’s pretty hard to get overwhelmed from an everyday newspaper. Overall, with technology today I believe the obvious statement is that it is easier and more efficient to read online media sources to get more information from more than one perspective. The different multimedia that is used on the USA Today site already makes it better than its newsprint.