News Track: Time Keeps on Tickin’…Into the Future

Like the Steve Miller Band song so catchily warned, “time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking/into the future.” He might as well have been writing about Time magazine.

As daily newspapers fold and local TV news programs lose viewers, there’s no doubt the future of the industry is online. Time magazine was quick to hop aboard the multimedia train before it derailed its readers.

Not only is the magazine’s website user friendly, it’s also aesthetically pleasing, a key ingredient to keeping ‘Net surfers on the site a little longer. It’s a busy website but not annoyingly so. The headlines of the most important stories are in boldface and bigger than the lighter pieces’.

The news junkie can get his fix under “Latest Headlines,” a section for hard-hitting news stories with updates at least every fifteen minutes.

Another nifty feature called “News in Brief” resembles the printed version section of the same title. Within this little box is an entertaining Top Ten category displaying various lists, ranging from “Inept Terrorist Plots” to the more trivial “Most Colorful First Spouses.” Next to the Top Tens are brief Q&A sessions with various movers and shakers, ranging from world leaders to rockstars.

I particularly like a section entitled “Most Popular” featuring Time.com’s most viewed and most emailed stories of the day. (Many sites have this feature, but I’m still going to give Time props for it because I like it that much). You can get a real sense of the buzz of the moment.

Near the bottom of Time’s page is their “Multimedia” section. I found an interesting video about the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Thousands of participants flock to this barren desert locale to celebrate art (and burn it later) and create a makeshift community each September. The Burning Man festival has been criticized in the past for being nothing more than a glorified week of drugs and sex, but the majority of participants insist those activities are simply not the point.

The Burning Man Festival

This year’s theme was Evolution. One giant art installation features a butterfly with intricate detailing meant to represent female reproductive anatomy.

Participants are encouraged to display the annual theme on a smaller scale themselves, be it through costumes, tent decorations or other creative means.

I found Time.com’s video to be intriguing. It gives the viewer a short, un-narrated snippet of the Burning Man festival. There are no voiceovers, no interviews, or pithy conclusions. The only sounds are the natural sounds of the campground—the cheering and whooping of an excited crowd, and the popping of fireworks as they spiral upwards in the sky and explode. The campers themselves create the musical score on drums, cymbals and tambourines.

Compared to the New York Times’ coverage of the Burning Man festival, Time.com’s video gave the viewer a much better sense of what the apex of the festival is really like, when the centerpiece is burned. More a mini-documentary than a standard news package, the video can linger on particular images, like a group of men and women dancing with fire-lit torches, for a bit longer. The camera pans wide for the last shot, and the viewer gets a sense of the sheer amount of people at the Burning Man festival, without any journalist ever feeding the reader a specific number.

The only downside is that Time.com’s video delivers no background story. The reader won’t walk away from the video knowing the ins and outs of the Burning Man festival. I would recommend that Time includes a link to another informative, more traditional article on the event.

In one respect, the New York Times has an upper hand on Time.com’s multimedia video because their slideshow of pictures has captions.

I have a feeling the attendees would enjoy Time’s coverage of their yearly event, because after all, the video lets the Burning Man festival speak for itself.

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Tags: Burning Man festival, Time

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