What ABC News can learn from YouTube
"ABC is the only major broadcast network that is using the staff of its evening newscast to produce a separate and distinct daily program for a Web audience," a New York Times feature reports today. Among the differences from the broadcast show: More casual correspondents, plus longer back-and-forths between anchor and reporter that would be cut to seven seconds on cable. But ABC's online clips are shackled by two Web video blunders.
First, the site's layout is a mess. Without either a strong narrative thread or a tidy navigational hierarchy, it's too easy to get lost among the overly busy pages. Worse, ABC's videos aren't easily — if at all — embeddable. For all the news crew's hard work, surfers won't discover the Web-only segments on their favorite blogs. ABC seems to expect us to come to abcnews.com and click around for clips. How very 1.0.