I mentioned in another posting that some headline items at online news sites are not current. Browsing through the ABC News: Nightline page I see a headline titled “Natalie Portman takes on terrorism.” (Okay, maybe that really shouldn’t even be a news headline but it got my attention).

With the current conflict in the middle east and knowing that Portman is Jewish, I thought that it might be something related to the crisis between Israel and Lebanon. But, no, it was a story dated March 26, more than four months ago, about her movie “V for Vendetta.”

Of course, the page does have a link to the side to a video clip that says it’s about Natalie Portman’s views on terrorism. Is it? It’s a minute long clip of a longer interview locked away in the premium video services.

A lot of the ABC News site seems to be all about getting you to click on the links and convince you to pay out for the premium service. Of course, that’s the online business but it’s rather annoying. I’ve always thought as the major networks as commodities when it came to their news offerings. If I choose a premium service with one of these networks, I’m only going to select one….which one?

This afternoon I spent some time evaluating the video-based services of online news sites, particularly from the perspective of someone living outside of North America.

CNN - first I clicked on the button for paid premium service. Not what I want even at $2.95 a month, though I’m sure that price is low enough to get a lot of people to sign up.

Then I went to the non-paid service. The video displayed but no sound. I selected another news item which gave me a message that my Windows Media Player needed to be upgraded to version 9. So I click on the link CNN gives me to download the latest update. I get an error message saying that Firefox can’t connect to the page. Sorry, CNN, too much trouble, you lose, I’m going to the next news service, bye.

But, wait, just to see what would happen, I selected the option to proceed to the CNN video without downloading the latest Windows Media Player. It’s not bad but not great. But CNN warned me that it might not be so great without the newer player. After a slow start the audio was fine. The video wasn’t continuous, more like a series of still images but perhaps that was because of the codec. At least, it wasn’t jerky. The image quality was quite good. So, I’ll try it a little more and see if I can ever get that latest download from Microsoft.

ABC News: they have their premium news service, also. Sign up is rather complicated, a lot of options. Then it says that the premium service is available free to subscribers of the “flowing services“. What the hell is a flowing service? Is that some new net jargon that I’ve missed or did they misspell “following”. The services listed are comcast, aol, bellsouth, sbcyahoo, verizon.

I check into ABC news site several times a week but how many times are they going to keep highlighting the Sheryl Crow talks about her cancer video?

So, now for the free video from ABC. The player tells me to download Flash player 8 or above, sigh. Why can’t watching all online video be as easy as watching YouTube?

Ok, so I follow the link from the ABC site to the Adobe site where I download the installer for Flash player 9. I’m excited….Shit, I have to close Firefox to install the player…need to save this post you’re now reading in WordPress…can’t Adobe install the player, restart Firefox automatically and return you to all the same pages and tabs that you had open? Seem like I’ve seen some installers that do that, no?

It’s later in the day and I now see a link to the ABC World News webcast. There’s a 15 second commercial before the webcast…ok…this looks pretty good. I’ll try to remember watching.

The link for the RSS feed is more prominent on the ABC World News page than at CNN. The feed also includes enclosure tags for the video and not just news headlines. I’m going to monitor both the CNN and ABC news feeds for a few days and see which one I find more useful.

I like having the less than half-hour nightly world news program available as a webcast. While there are a lot of individual videos on these news site, I (being lazy) prefer a package. Yes, that limits the news that I learn about but I don’t have to spend time choosing. Also, on the individual segments it’s hard to know whether those are current items or segments that have been online for a week or more.

I’ll look at some of the other news services in part 2 in a few days or so. Meanwhile, I’ll see how ABC and CNN work for me.

A post over at Joe Wikert’s blog talks about the decreasing relevance of online news resources, particularly those offered by newspapers. Living in Argentina, I’m very dependent upon online news sites for what’s happening back in the U.S. But I don’t find any of the new sites very useful. Out of habit I check CNN.com online daily but find it frustrating as many of the headlines don’t change too often, particulary those in the lower sections of the main page. Some of these headlines seem to stay the same for a couple of days. I like for my news to be updated daily, if not several times a day.

On many occasions I hear about breaking stories from entries on blogs, just regular, ordinary blogs where someone thought it relevant to post about something happening in the world. More than once, I’ve seen something on a blog and went to a news site for more info only to find that nothing was available. I ended up going to Google news for the latest info.

Perhaps I just haven’t figured out how to customize the offerings of online news so that it works for me. Indeed, writing this post made me think about going to check the CNN page just to finally notice that CNN does offer headlines via RSS. I’m going to try that and see what I think. I’m also going to examine some of the online news sites closer to see if I can a good solution that keeps me informed. I’m a news junky and always watched a lot of news on TV back in the U.S. But, somehow the online world just hasn’t yet satisfied me in the same way even with all the online video that’s available.

Anyway, I feel like I have to go searching for the best online news solution rather than having good options easily presented to me. I’m lazy and so are a lot of people. So, it does seem like the online news services have more work to do.

I’ll post more on this topic as I explore the options.