Sydney Morning Herald's strong emphasis on video

The multimedia content of the Sydney Morning Herald's website is understated on its homepage. The emphasis is very much on text and photos - the video section only becomes prominent once you hit the page down button twice (on a 1280x800 screen resolution) and the only graphic is beside the business section, a further 'page down' press away.

But with a little bit of digging, the multimedia content certainly is there. The video section is quite comprehensive, and features content from Reuters as well as its own content produced in-house. As we learned this semester, users are up to 20 times more likely to watch a video if it is embedded into the article as opposed to be linked to from it (Thurman and Lupton 2008). The SMH have the right idea by embedding their videos, like they have in this article.

There doesn't appear to be many blogs. The most visible exception to this was Flog, SMH's soccer blog. It's very easy to navigate - it can be searched easily by team, competition and by person. It has only been updated twice since Sydney FC played Melbourne Victory in the A-League final on February 14, however. Comments are welcome, but in the example here there is only five. There is also a political blog.

Insofar as multimedia goes, SMH's emphasis is on video which it does very well. It is also has lots of articles and it's very easy to navigate. It doesn't, however, have as much user interaction or different types of multimedia as its counterparts in this part of the world. The feel of the website is very much top-down as opposed to horizontal - perhaps it's not surprising that there are only five comments on that blog post.