It’s a couple of days now since Obama took office and the dust has settled. On the day itself, we watched the inauguration at work, sat at our desks with Sky’s excellent HD stream in a window in the corner as we got on with our work. Very impressive. It shamed the BBC.
Talk is that the event provided a much-needed boost in newspaper sales right around the world, probably on account of people buying extra copies to keep, but with newspaper circulations in seemingly terminal decline you have to wonder whether Obama’s will be the last-ever front-page inauguration. When more readers turn from paper to pixel every day, there can’t possibly be as many print-based news outlets left when president 45 takes the oath.
Does that matter? Probably not. There’s something nice about holding printed material, but you can’t beat the immediacy of the web and, let’s face it, news outlets are information producers at the end of the day, not printing firms. A lot of them don’t even own their own presses.
So if we’re going to start collecting home pages rather than front pages in the future, what does this year’s coverage tell us about the future?
The Guardian provided exceptional coverage, redesigning its front page around lunchtime to give the main story almost all of the space above the fold. This was updated throughout the course of the ceremony and supplemented by a slideshow gallery and an offer of live video.
The Guardian in the morning, and the afternoon
CNN did the same thing, but not to quite the same extent. It still changed its regular front page to give the main story more prominence but it didn’t have the impact of the Guardian’s approach.
CNN before and after the inauguration
Al-Jazeera didn’t give the story much prominence on its front page at all. You had to click through to the Americas section to find its full treatment.
Al-Jazeera relegated most of its coverage to a sub-page
Pravda, the most recognisable Russian news source, wasn’t entirely unbiassed in its coverage. Obama got the top billing on its English-language pages, but the tone was more opinion-led than factual:
Barack Obama takes office as Republicans’ scapegoat
USA’s new President Barack Obama is taking office January 20. George W Bush was a big headache for the whole world, although his successor does not seem to be a man who can become the saviour of the great nation. Those thinking that the USA will have many positive changes in its politics after Obama comes to power think it wrong. It touches upon the US-Russian relations too. The Republicans simply decided to move over to make Obama become an intermediate figure. John McCain was too conservative to win. If Obama does not manage to extricate the nation from the crisis in two or three years, the Reps will unveil their real candidate.
Obama can hardly be described as Russia’s friend
The next biggest story on the page was about Hillary’s appointment as Secretary of State:
Hillary Clinton to bring four years of war as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton as the US Secretary of State will not change anything. The colour of the skin does not change the essence of aggressive politics. She definitely enjoys great respect in the United States as a woman who returned to big politics after the infamous scandal with her husband. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, Clinton has a more subtle perception of the moment. She realises that life is not based on the American dream but follows a completely different motto: ‘We either swim or drown’.
Pravda’s approach was more opinion-based
Of the UK’s three main broadcasters, the BBC, ITV and Sky, Sky won out. Its top strip, which takes up roughly the same amount of screen space as the Guardian’s, was a bit uncomfortable as it didn’t really have enough content to fill it out, but it did make an ‘event’ of the story, unlike its competitors.
The BBC didn’t depart greatly from its regular template, which was a shame as it has knocked the right-hand section of headlines down to give important stories full width in the past, but I guess those headlines, relating to the inauguration, were still pretty important.
ITV’s showing was the poorest.
The best before-and-after changes were those on the White House website itself. At the end of the Bush era it was a boring Web 1.0 design where the content was fighting the boxes and furniture for attention. It lacked any clear heirarchy. Ugh:
With Obama installed it was colourful, inviting, and somewhere you might actually want to visit. There’s even a blog:
George W Bush’s personal site wasn’t much better than the White House one. You’d think that it would be trumpeting what he considers the best achievements of his time in office, but instead it was selling calendars. And it didn’t even have his name at the top of the page, opting instead for the Republican National Committee:
The scene at georgewbush.com
In all, I’ve got 80 screen grabs from the day of the inauguration itself, and others from the day before and the day after, and they’re interesting to look at now that it’s all over. Whether they’ll ever have the same meaning as a newspaper front page, only time will tell. At the moment, though, they do little more than illustrate how different outlets covered one of the most important stories of American history.
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