Read more about Jayden's favorite media platforms. In this piece she analyses what she enjoys most about each of their digital publications. Continue reading...
Every morning I read Vox, Business Insider and El Pais.
I read Vox because I value their explainer article format. Business Insider stays on my morning news docket because I find business news interesting, and I’ve started reading El País this semester because it seems useful to keep up with Spanish news while in Spain.
When you open Vox’s website, the first thing you notice is the categories at the top of the page. Vox is a digital native news outlet and thus, has never had to have the traditional news sections. As a result, there are sections like Recode (their technology section), The Goods (a mix of business and lifestyle), The Highlight (a section of essays and Q&A’s about big ideas) and Future Perfect (a section on effective altruism) that catch your eye and lead you to a diverse array of stories as well as important breaking news sections on Ukraine and COVID-19. I also appreciate that they break up their top stories and latest stories sections with new podcast episodes as it's a useful way to be reminded of other forms of media. However, I really don’t like the yellow lines they use to break up other sections on the homepage. It makes sense with the overall yellow highlighted notes theme, but the yellow on white can be hard to see.
While Vox’s homepage layout still recalls physical newspaper layouts, Business Insider’s homepage is more divorced from the newspaper format. I appreciate that they highlight one story at the top of the homepage and display the story’s summary bullet points so that even if you don’t want to read about, for example, eight products that will get more expensive in Spain because of the war in Ukraine, you can get the main idea. They also display a handful of related stories underneath and give one story from three different sections (motor, politics and economy) on the same topic, which is the war on Ukraine as of writing. I think this works well as it drives readers towards the stories that the editors deem most interesting, but it is annoying as a reader to have such a tightly themed section at the top take up two pages of scrolling because if I want to read any non-Ukraine news, it takes longer to find it.
Similar to Business Insider, El País' homepage begins with a large section on the war in Ukraine. However, instead of displaying a large photo like BI does, they highlight a video with footage of the war. I appreciate this choice as the video is more engaging than the images of Ukraine on the other homepages. I also love El País' choice of font. Most news outlets stay away from serif fonts online, but El País’ headline and description fonts use serifs, and it recalls the feeling of reading a physical newspaper (most of which use serif fonts). However, similar to Business Insider, I don’t like having to scroll through two screens/pages of Ukraine news to see anything else. Highlighting the war makes sense, but I’d also appreciate seeing the news about Feijóo or the sustainability mobility law somewhere at the top.
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