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.