This week I decided to evaluate the Huffington Post for my news paper evaluation. This may be weird but, this is the first time I have ever heard of the Huffington Post and was really anxious to see what it was like. The edition of the paper I evaluated was the issue from September 19, 2013.
When I went to the website the news source was set up like every other newspaper website. It had the main stories on the home page, with different categories on the top that you could select. Unlike other news websites though, there is a substantial amount of news stories on the home page. You can scroll down for a while before you run out of stories to look at. Just like other news outlets you can evaluate a lot of different topics from politics to entertainment. Unlike other websites though I did not see a sports option at the top and did, however, see a comedy section at the top which is pretty unique to the website.
The top story on the website was about Cruz peddling Obamacare repeal. The main idea of the story was that Cruz is upset at house republicans for not going full out trying to repeal Obamacare. He states that the republicans are just giving up and need to continue to push forward on this issue or Obamacare won’t be repealed until we get a new President.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/ted-cruz-government-shutdown-2013_n_3953754.html
Besides this main article there were two other stories I looked at. The first was about a man, Thomas Marrone getting a DUI charge while driving a lawn mower. Apparently this man was trying to drive on his lawn mower home, about 6 miles away, and was completely drunk and deserved the charge. This was probably one of the funniest stories I have read. The second story I looked at was about more mass shootings that we haven’t heard about since the Newtown shooting. It was shocking to me to see that there have been 16 mass shootings since then that I have not heard about. This story made me sick to my stomach seeing that all these terrible shootings take place frequently.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/mass-shootings-2013_n_3941889.html?utm_hp_ref=crimehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/thomas-marrone-dui-lawn-m_n_3954012.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news
The audience for this outlet would have to be more towards people under 30. This media outlet has more stories that would favor younger audiences like the comedy section or the weird section. Older people would probably not be too interested in these sections and would chose another media source to get their news.
Overal I believe this media outlet appealed to me due to the reason I set above. I’d rather read about weird or comedy stories than a political story. I know that sounds bad but I like to be entertained when I’m reading news and I can’t be entertained when I’m reading about politics.