Online Journalism News

Sky News revamps website with Pluck and Daylife

Sky News has today unveiled an extensively redeveloped website

Sky, which has been running its new site in a public beta test for the last week, has introduced a series of new social features to its site allowing users to personalize pages, track stories and share their interests with others.

Video is at the forefront of the revamp; a revolving carousel of the top five news stories has been added to the home page and short video clips accompany headlines.

The new community features will be powered by social media technology from Pluck allowing users comment on blogs and discussion boards.

The Daylife news aggregator has been integrated into the site to allow users to find related stories along topic, person, country, town or theme from a news database.

The new site also incorporates a function called Choose Your News that will allow users to select categories of news they want to be informed about. A ‘Story Tracker’ feature will automatically update users on the latest developments of a story without the need to search for updates.

The site will introduce a greater amount of comment and analysis from the channel's correspondents and presenters, each of whom have been given a blog.

"We aim to capitalise on Sky News online's key strengths, from strong video content to quality journalism, an innovative use of graphics to a loyal online community," said Steve Bennedik, editor of Sky News networked media.

"The features we are introducing to personalise the site are just the start of a process aimed at allowing our users to tailor sky.com/news to suit all their online needs."

In addition to these changes Sky is planning to incorporate its video sharing tool, SkyCast, into the news pages to encourage its users to submit their own videos and to host live daily online debates.

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