THE long-awaited Inside.com site from Powerful Media rolled out its first edition yesterday – and we are surprisingly quite impressed.
We were warned that it was a sneak preview, but the site does seem to use the Internet to advantage.
There are still some techno bugs to iron out. For example, a box on Movie Releases 2000 did not align correctly on our screen.
The Power Index – and its ability to track rises and falls on a daily basis is probably going to be widely quoted. But we worry that it could be plagued by cyber ballot stuffing, since Web surfers get to vote.
The news is packaged in five broad categories: TV; film; music; media, and books.
Day One shows a particularly strong effort in television news. It gives quick reviews of yesterday’s late night talk shows, including Jay Leno and David Letterman, as well as capsule summaries of the morning’s talk show hosts. It gives one sentence links to a variety of daily papers and shows in a graph how papers from San Francisco to New York rate shows.
Book news was also a strong suit.
Other media news fell a bit short of the TV and book coverage, and much of the gossip was derivative.
Great use of graphics – pie charts, bar charts, pop ups and tables. For instance, a table demonstrating the book clout of Oprah Winfrey shows how books were selling before they were selected for reading in the Oprah Book Club – and how they fared after their selection. Always a treat to see it in black and white. They do a solid job of reporting the lunch circuit.
We were impressed that they knew that The Post’s own Media Ink columnist Keith Kelly dined in the Frank Ghery-designed Conde Nast cafeteria with Conde Nast CEO Steve Florio – but wonder how they missed New York magazine’s Michael Wolff dining with Editorial Director James Truman. (Lunch will never be the same for media columnists).
We were happy to read our friendly rival Alex Kuczynski at the New York Times was holding court at Michael’s, dispensing kindly advice. It gets high marks on lunch news – but we wonder how valuable that is really.
Curiously, the fonts and color scheme remind us of our favorite Web humor site, TheOnion.com. They were so similar, it made us wonder if The Onion designer had jumped ship and landed at Inside.
And the Co-Chairman Michael Hirschorn and Kurt Andersen show they have a sense of humor about it all, with touches such as “Mogul Astrology.
If there was one complaint – there was too much stuff.Post editors