Looking at the competition

Some say you are only as good as your competition. To put this theory to the test, I looked at the website for KOMU's competitor KMIZ, ABC 17.

One thing I really liked on KMIZ's home page was the ABC 17 stromtracker. The stromtracker shows a 7-day forecast. It also does a spin off of the Department of Homeland security's terrorist threat level by doing a threatening weather level. This shows the possibility of severe or hazardous weather.

The storm tracker then cycles through photos of some of the major cities in the market, showing the temperature in each particular city. In lecture Jen Reeves told us that the main reason people log onto these websites for weather. If this is ture, than KOMU is seriously lacking. KOMU only shows forecasts for today and tomorrow on its homepage.

KOMU dominates in terms of online reporting. KOMU's web content features stories somplete with quotes and new information about the story that in some instances is different from the video, that accompanies them on the web.

I attempted to review the online videos at KMIZ, however, none of the ones I clicked on worked. The videos would not play. This is a major problem for a news station in this era of online media. KMIZ's web stories were only short blurbs about the story

Without a working video player, KMIZ is significantly behind KOMU in news content in a time in which online journalism is on the rise. However, KMIZ boasts superior weather content.