US News... US Snooze

Lindsey Abel

Brandon Arnold

Shawn Blair

Kathy Bowman

2. Top Stories

• Best Places to Retire
  

This Article lays out ten of the best places to retire in America. It features a video of the amazing, stylistic water dancing of the "Aquabelles." Placed front-and-center on the homepage, this article seems to be the most important story in the US News. It was definitely the first thing we noticed.

• Crisis on Wallstreet
  

Placed on the right side of the page, this is section includes many articles about America's financial crisis like the $700 billion bailout. This section is much more in-depth and has links  to many podcasts and videos.

• Afraid of Heights? Try Skydiving. 

This is an article written by a women explaining the fears and experiences involved in skydiving. Includes a photo and six comments from readers agreeing that skydiving is quite an experience and perhaps the best way for the elderly to finally get over their fears of heights.

3. Most Popular Articles

The site offers both a list of the top 5 most popular and most e-mailed articles. There is no link to the list, however it is visible on the front page of the site. The "most viewed" articles focus on politics and the economy, while the "most emailed" focus on health and editorials.

4. Blogs

There is an extensive page for blogs, mostly from reporters and editors. All of the blogs are organized by the author of the blog, or the subject. The page would probably best be used to browse around when readers get bored, but it doesn't seem like specific blogs could be found very easily.

5. Opinions

Most of the opinion articles and editorials are staff writers expressing their opinions on different issues. There are some links to reader commentaries, but not many people comment on the articles.

Political cartoons are always a nice way to break up the boredom:

Readers are also able to leave comments after articles, but there are few specific reader discussion boards, and there doesn't seem to be any heavy debates between readers at all. 

6. Multimedia

Videos, photos, and podcasts are all available and easily accessable, but many are of poor quality and not very cool. It is very simple to imbed any US News article to any number of different platforms like facebook.com or ma.gnolia.com, so that's nice.