From Mr. Gray's blog:
How does Al Jazeera REPRESENT the world Islamic communty?
1) How do the look and layout of the Al Jazeera home pages (English and Arabic) compare? - can you think of any explanations for these differences.
The Arabic homepage is very dense. Content is the top priority and the entire thing is neatly organised. There's a marquee on the top of the page which acts as instant rolling news to direct users as quickly as possible away from the index page.
The English homepage is relaxed about it's layout. It has one simple unifying theme and is not organised efficiently so as to shorten the path between the user landing on the index page and their arrival at content. Essentially this is because the English section of Al Jazeera is only really included as an afterthought, a second priority. The audience is different, those arriving on the english Al-Jazeera will be much more likely to search hard for what they want, as they must have gone out of their way to find the english Al Jazeera.
2) Describe the 'interactivity' of the website (explore several pages) - where do the links take you? How does this compare with a similar website such as the BBC Homepage?
I spent fifteen minutes clicking on random links, Google Translate got itself stuck in a loop and I can't speak Arabic, so I have no idea what I'm reading. I've noticed each page usually has two pictures, and these give handy clues as to what the stories are about. For example a stroy with a picture of some people playing football is probably a sport story.
I quite like the cartoons, this one in particular:
Al Jazeera features a prominent two-way dialogue. Commenting appears to be anonymous and easy, unfortunately threads are not nested, but it's much better than the BBC, whose response sections are relegated to 'Have Your Say', and recent experiments checking twitter hashtags #HIGNFY for Have I got News For You and #BBCQT for BBC Question Time.
3) Now look at a different media source - Watch Al Jazeera TV - How does the production and style of the reporting differ from the BBC TV news?
Unfornately I can't, because the school computers use Internet Explorer and don't have RealPlayer. I have Firefox on my USB drive, but I left it at home. Instead I watched something on the arabic website about ancient plates. I didn't understand anything but 1 minute 30 seconds seemed a bit long for a report that was basically just someone being interviewed about old crockery. Having watched a second report featuring long shots of people walking up a hill I would say that Al Jazeera tends to focus on trivial events so as to distract people from the actual news. Then again Al Jazeera were fantastic during the assault ont he Mavi Marmara, and I can't really judge without fully understanding what's going on.
DISCLAIMER: I'm actually doing this ~2 hours before the lesson, as Patrick has only just told me about it.
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