There are things that I have found out while I was doing my investigation on online news here in South Africa. On line my investigation I used two privately owned news organizations which are News24 and Times Live and at the other hand I used SABC which is South African Public Broadcaster.
In all these three news organizations there are lot of common things , on all home pages when I open on top of the page is a top story then in the middle news are grouped in order , on top is South Africa stories then followed by African stories and the last is the Internationally stories (World).
News24 and Times Live are more the same because while I was doing my investigation the top story was the same on both news organizations (Malema’s story) but I think Times Live is the best because it uses more videos in their stories compared to News24, when I was checking News24 only got videos for Super sports on their home page while Times Live almost got video for every story.
Both News24 and Times Live got column where bloggers can blog about latest issues and the design for blog column is more the same as it is found on the bottom of the page in both news organization , while the two I mentioned above got column for blogs it doesn’t mean one can find blog column on SABC website , there is none!
All the three news organizations are moving with technology because all of them can be joined through some well-known social networks like Facebook and Twitter. They can be joined on these social networks and when whenever there is breaking news all those who have joined will get the news on their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Both News24 and Times Live are more like a newspaper because there got place on their home page where there client can advertise their product but on SABC homepage there is no section for advertisement.
SABC as a public Broadcaster I can say they are sometimes outdated coz on their homepage they still got State of Nation Address as one of the top stories and now the SONA is almost week old. All the news organizations always got their financial reporting (JSE) on the middle section of their homepage and it is always on the right-hand side. The only thing that seems to be good about SABC is that they got audio on top of their homepage on some of their top stories and other news organizations got no audio news they got videos
One thing that makes me to say Times Live is the best is by the way the have developed their site, when I was going down I realized they also have links for the top newspapers they are associated with, which are Sowetan Live , The Herald and Daily Dispatch and on the top of the page they also got an option where one can click to see all the videos uploaded on that day .
