Great African News Source (allafrica.com)

Member Name: coolthang

Product:	allafrica.com
Date:	14/05/02 (42 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: In depth, Good Pictures

Disadvantages: None

This site as you guessed it has something to with Africa. This site is contains the news from all over Africa from various news agencies which submit their news to allAfrica. The site is split into three main sections. These sections are 'Top Stories', 'Regions' which have news from different areas of Africa and the final section of the site is 'Topics' which is split into all the various current news issue's in Africa such as AIDS and Music.

This site when you first arrive introduces you with the mission statement of the website which is 'AllAfrica Global Media is the leading provider of African news and information worldwide, through news feeds to institutional and agency clients and through allAfrica.com. We post more than 700 new stories daily from over 100 African media organizations and from our own award-winning reporters.'

Also when you first arrive on the site you are given the option to read the site in French which is very good because the site caters for the two main languages of the west. This site isn't set out as well as the BBC for instance as this site isn't very flashy and trying to force us to download multimedia clips but it provides the main purpose of the site which is the news.

The main news section of the site contains very in-depth news reports and also there are large photo's on the site. The news reports when I went to look at them were very topical and weren?t just some issue's that no one really cares about. Also the news reports offer links to other websites such as the BBC if you want to find out more information about the news report that you're reading about. I found the frontpage of this site very useful because it contained very good news reports and I also had the options to find out more about the issue I was reading about if I so wished.

The first section along the left (the left is where the options are situated) is the 'R
egions' section. This section of the site is split into Northern, Eastern, Southern, Western and Central Africa. When one of these links is clicked you are taken to a site that is identical to the front page although the centre of the page contains a list of all the news reports and lists their origin. I found the regions site very good because it provided a lot of news reports in one area and I could also find out the origin of the news source if I so wished because as you know some organizations are more biased than others when writing news reports but luckily this website manages to keep it's self unbiased.

The next section along the site is the 'Topics' section. When you go read about a topic the site is set out identical to regions site because it lists all the news sections down the middle of the site. These news sections are very in depth and I found them very useful for a report that I had to write on a African aspect.

The topics section also contains some other sections. These are 'Special Reports' which contain some even more in-depth news reports but these are usually about the state of Africa in one way or another. The next main section of the topic site is the 'Photo Essays' which provide a very good source of information and a real information about Africa and as they say 'A picture paints a thousand words'.

Overall I thought this tie was very good and I would be happy to read this site again.

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