Comparison of the news sites.

My 4 online news sites are http://www.foxnews.com/, http://northcountrynow.com/, http://gretawire.blogs.foxnews.com/, http://www.abc.net.au/news/offbeat/.

I can compare these sites based on many levels. I’m going to focus on their ease of use, the frequency of updating their sites, and the multimedia content of each site on their first page.
Gretawire.com the blog and foxnews.com are almost identical (they are provided by the same company Fox News.) These two sites have all the same top banners and link tabs on both. All of the headlines/titles for the stories are links; all the images in the stories are links as well. On foxnews.com every featured headline story has accompanying links below and at the side bars of the hook paragraph to link to more information about other stories with similar subject matter as the featured story.
On northcountrynow.com the entire page is set up like a newspaper, only there are interactive elements included. All the ads on the page are links to the companies specific WebPages. The body of the page is immensely filled with hyperlinks. The entire left edge of the page are lists of links to the basic parts of any newspaper: Classifieds, News (which is redundant because it contains links to the other parts of the website that you can find in the main body of the page), Your Views, Recreation and Entertainment, Local Websites, Hometown Photos, Explore Northern NY, and About NCNow. The interesting part of these link categories on the left side is they break down into more specific links, for example under News there are the following more specific links: (NCNow News, Local Obituaries, Engagements, Weddings, Anniversaries, Weather, Local Business, News Links, Sports Links, NC This Week.) A unique difference between all of the other pages and NCN.com is on this page the headlines of the stories are not links themselves, there are links under every headline that says where the news was found; for example the link of a headline of a story from Watertown Daily Times goes directly to watertowndailytimes.com. In the body of the page are titled sections with even further links; these sections include New Today, NCNow Survey, Local Sports, Opinion, Featured Blogs and Forums, Obituaries & Services, Recently Added Videos, and Recently Added Websites.
Finally, my specialty news site is the ABC News – Offbeat. Although it does not actually say what ABC represents I think it is hosted from the Australian Broadcast Channel. So anyway this is the simplest site for ease of use. Like foxnews.com and gretawire.com, this site has top banners and link tabs. The only other links on the page are the titles of the news story, and the related tags listed in a line under the hook sentences of each story. So if you see a headline you like, click it to read the story or if you are further interested in the subject you can click on the listed tags.
Gretawire.com, foxnews.com and northcountrynow.com are the most frequently updated news sites of the four. ABC – Offbeat is least frequently updated because it is more difficult to find new strange news stories so often. Gretwire.com is the next least frequently updated because this is a blog and it is not concerned with updating breaking news. But, the reason it is more frequently updated than ABC – Offbeat is all of the new threads that are being created all day long. The foxnews.com and northcountrynow.com sites are the most frequently updated because these sites focus on breaking news.
The multimedia content on the first pages of these websites differ greatly. The Fox News site contains streaming video and images. All of the images and the videos are clickable links. On gretawire.com most of the multimedia content is in the form of videos, but also the limited number of still images on the page are clickable links. On northcountrynow.com there is limited multimedia content, the content on this page are in the form of still images as well as all of these images are clickable links. On ABC News – Offbeat there is no multimedia content on this page at all.