Not strong enough of an annoyance for the pit, really…
I’ve noticed lately on CNN.com and the like that many of their headline stories link only to streaming video. This sucks! For one thing, it’s an unnecessary waste of bandwidth. For another thing, I’m oftimes at work and don’t want to be watching streaming video on the company’s box, as having to use sound to get the info can be annoying to cubemates and not the impression I want to give my superiors of how I’m spending my day.
Can’t you dickwads force your underpaid monkeys to type out a few lines of text, fer chrissakes?
I completely agree. I can’t begin to count the number of times CNN.com will have a headline that sounds really interesting, but the only link is to a video. I don’t watch videos at work and I keep the sound muted so it wouldn’t help anyway. Stop linking all the good stories to videos damnit!
Wait until your employer discovers webcasts. 30-60 minutes of streaming video of the CEO saying something corporatespeak and showing a few PowerPoint slides, conveying approximately as much information as the average email (and less than the average Dope post). Yawn :o
Sometimes they’ll have a “Read” link too, but Og I hate this as well. I can skim the article faster than waiting for a video to load so some idiot can yammer for 5 minutes.
While I hate the streaming video-only stories at least as much as anyone here, I think I know why they do it that way.
The reason, as I see it, is so they can subject you to a commercial before the videos start playing. It’s pretty well unavoidable, so they can charge more for those commercials than banner ads.
CNN.com is no longer my main source of news for that very reason. Somehow, I could not train myself to check first to see if there is a little camera thing next to the headline. Now I’m looking mostly at the BBC website for my news, and the difference in perspective and tone is welcome. And, it’s well-written, and I can scan the text instead of having to take in the emotional spin. I like news in the “artillery…parade…tsunami warning…March Madness…Nikkei average…decapitated…El Nino…elephants at the San Diego Zoo…Beckham…Spice…military coup” form. If I want more than that, I’ll go looking.
Shit, man, I get most of my news from here. I figure if it’s worth knowing somebody’s going to start a thread about it. Everything from the latest on Darfur to the Mecha Michael Jackson. One stop shopping.
I’m happy to say that I use text first when I’m posting stuff on my company’s website, then go fetch the video later. But I’m working for a local station.
Hear hear! I can’t watch videos at work. Same for those posters who post video links with “this is the awesomest thing ever” and no explanation…I smite you!
Ditto. I don’t have my home computer speakers hooked up, so I have to switch over to the work computer and then it’s usually a stupid video account anyway. I hate that!
>Can’t you dickwads force your underpaid monkeys to type out a few lines of text, fer chrissakes?
Couldn’t agree more. When people do something this bolt-stupid, it goes beyond intellectual evolution and descends into the hoary realm of disciplinary problems. Video for spoken news stories is like using an atom bomb to kill a gnat that’s already dead.
BTW, I sent a comment to CNN expressing my sentiment on this matter. Wish me luck… :rolleyes:
As bump and dnoonan mentioned, it’s very likely for the ad revenue, especially since I’ve noticed they do this only on odd/human interest stories (the kind that pique your curiosity), not main news headline stories.
Since it’s all about the advertising and the corporate desire for us to never have a moment without being exposed to it, I don’t see this changing, and in fact it will only get worse.
Amen to the OP. In my country some of the newspaper’s sites have links to streamed videos instead of to text. Can you believe it? I turn to their sites to read the news, not watching a “loading” bar and then some stutter. Jesus.
