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web site spotlight
Sreenivasan (ss221@columbia.edu) teaches new media and broadcasting at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.
Web Site Spotlight puts individual news sites through a CAT scan. This time, as the 1998 election draws near, we examine the online offerings of three leading old-media Washington publications that cover Capitol Hill — Roll Call, The Hill, and Congressional Quarterly.
Roll Call: "Plug Into Congress"
This forty-three-year-old bi-weekly newspaper's site provides a one-stop guide to the Hill and the legislative process. It has a good mix of the serious business and the lighter side of politics (trivia quizzes and, recently, a poetry contest).
Among its resources: tools for tracking congressmen and senators. Search for them by name, state, or zip code; get contact information and personal Web pages; see their record on selected votes; and learn about contributors to their campaigns. There is also a 1998 election map that profiles each district in which a congressional seat is up for grabs in November, along with a prediction ("Toss Up," "Leans Republican," "Safe Democratic"). A section called "Policy Briefing" provides a range of perspectives from legislators and administration officials on particular topics.
About 80 percent of the paper is put online. News stories and commentary pieces go up Mondays and Thursdays. Unfortunately, the site remains hampered by the lack of a search engine and deep archives of past issues.
The Hill: "The Capitol Newspaper"
Nothing fancy here. Simplicity rules. About half of this weekly paper goes online every Wednesday, with emphasis on hard news. Not much is offered in terms of background stories or archives. Still, the columnists can provide some good reading, and be sure to check out "Punditspeak" for answers posed to a panel of political insiders each week.
The site needs to make better use of the Web's strengths by adding a search engine and, perhaps, a design that doesn't lump stories together on one screen.
CQ: "World's Biggest and Best Capitol Hill Press Corps via the Web"
With fifty staffers on the new media operations, CQ's CQ.com has by far the largest operation of these three sites. It showcases the Washington juggernaut that Congressional Quarterly, Inc. has become since it started, in 1945, as a service that provided records of congressional votes. Now the company puts out several publications, including CQ Weekly, CQ Daily Monitor, and CQ Researcher.
CQ.com consists partly of subscription-based services, such as CQ.com on Congress and CQ Politics for Pros. These highly detailed services are quite expensive — the price ranges from the thousands of dollars to many thousands, a spokesman says. They are not meant for the lay reader, although political reporters and editorial writers would likely find them useful.
The lay reader, meanwhile, can turn to CQ's four free sites — CQ Vote Watch, Governing Magazine, Campaigns & Elections, and American Voter, which includes an interactive feature, "Rate Your Rep."
