Happy (belated) Valentines!  To celebrate, lets take a look at National Geographic's Valentine's Day coverage.  I'll be eating chocolate (from my mom) while doing this. 

NG's main story this year was called "Valentine's Day: Why Do We Celebrate It? (Hint: Naked Romans)," certainly an eye-catching headline.  In true NG form, it goes a lot into the history, or in this case lore, of the holiday. 

My favorite quote from the story:

"The lovers' holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder." 

Ahh romance. 

Then in the third century AD, according to the article,Roman Emperor Claudius II decides to forbid young men to marry in an effort to strengthen his army.  According to legend, Valentine went against the emperor and secretly performed marriages.  And then of course was killed for it.  Hence, St. Valentine's Day.

The story then moves to present day discussing the economics of the holiday, (people are spending more money this year than they did last year which could be a sign that the economy is improving or may signify that people are overcompensating) and the mob mentality that makes people feel like they have to buy lots of chocolates and roses and greeting cards and fancy dinners.

But then the real gem of this article is about half way down the story with a link to a photo gallery of animal pairs being cute.  

All are adorable, but the winner has to be the dog licking the baby goat:

Credit: nationalgeographic.com, photo by Eric Winters, My Shot

In today's Daily News on the NatGeo website, the most popular story is " 'Supergiant,' Shrimp-Like Beasts Found in Deep Sea.  It's a crazy story about these foot-long, milky white, shrimp-like creatures that a group of people found off the coast of New Zealand.  Their main story was 5 paragraphs and was accompanied by a photo.  The story was linked to a photo gallery and each photo's caption gave new information.  The NatGeo story was pretty sparse compared to how they typically report, and it made me wonder if their reporter didn't have the access they normally do, or if it was a rush job.  I started looking at how other news organizations were handling the story and here's what I found...

CNN:  I liked CNN's coverage of the amphipods better than the NatGeo version.  CNN's coverage came with a video interviewing the principal scientist, Ashley Rowden and Anne-Nina Lorz, and amphipod specialist.  Here's a link to the story:  http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/03/supergiant-shrimplike-creatures-found-off-new-zealand/


That's it.  Really no other coverage of these crazy giant albino-looking shrimp things!  I couldn't believe it.  But it also made me appreciate the National Geographic coverage even more. 

National Geographic did what it always does really well:  allow the reader to explore different parts of their website while reading the story.  The story links to the New Zealand page of travel.nationalgeographic.com, the faculty blog page of Alan Jamieson who was a co-leader on the expedition, ocean.nationalgeographic.com and many more sites. 

National Geographic's Thursday coverage of Groundhog Day was surprisingly extensive.  While it covered all of the news aspects of Groundhog Day 2012, it also went heavily into the history of Groundhog Day and the origins of the tradition, something that the readers of National Geographic definitely appreciate.

A photo with a link to the story was the first photo on the main carousel of NatGeo's home page.  Perhaps as a result, it was the most viewed story on February 2. 

Nationalgeographic.com homepage

Clicking on the picture leads to the main story

Groundhog Day 2012: Punxsutawney Phil's Forecast Is In

"Immortal" rodent says six more weeks of winter, according to handlers.

The body of the story is loaded with outside links to groundhog.org (the official Groundhog Day website), punxsutawneyspirit.com (the hometown newspaper), and ncdc.noaa.org (National Climate Data Center).  However, most of the links are to other parts of the National Geographic website.  Also notice that the links don't have a hover feature that would allow you to see where the link is going before you click on it.  In other words, if you want to see where the link goes, you have to click it.  That probably pumps up the number of hits each section of Nationalgeographic.com gets daily (as NatGeo readers tend to be curious and want to know everything), and its just from this one story.  The links open in the same window, so every time you click a link, you have the hit "back" to get back to the original story, which is kind of annoying.  At the same time, I kept clicking the links, so I guess it wasn't that much of a deterrent.  Inside links include the page for the groundhog on animals.nationalgeographic.com, a map of Punxsutawney, PA on maps.nationalgeographic.com, links to previously written stories, to videos, and to photo galleries. There is also a link to set a National Geographic photo of a groundhog as your wallpaper.




The link to the photogallery redirects you to news.nationalgeographic.com.  The photo carousel has 8 photos (none of which are actual National Geographic photos), and underneath each photo is an excerpt from the main story, plus some additional info that you didn't get from the main story.  One of the photos is actually attributed to Your Shot, which is a section of the website where readers can upload their own photos, which could potentially be published in National Geographic Magazine.

Overall, a great article with excellent integration of other parts of nationalgeographic.com.