News 8 Austin has a website?

Yes, they sure do. It’s about as lame as the television channel, too.

I decided to blog on the credibility of News 8 Austin’s website because I was curious as to how my opinion of the television channel would hamper my views of their website. If, perhaps I had gone to the website and been somehow surprised or impressed maybe I would have felt not only the website was more credible but also the channel.

Regardless, the News 8 Austin website initially does seem somewhat credible if not spectacular. Each story shows a date and time stamp of when it was last updated and you can easily click to email the journalist in charge of the story.

The URL clearly belongs to the same News 8 we all know as it carries their logo in the address bar and the web address is simply www.news8austin.com.

There is a readily available and easy to find link on every page to the About Us section which takes you to a page that is obviously still within their website. This page is titled Contact Us though, which I thought was a little confusing as the link and the page should be titled the same.

The Contact Us page lists several addresses and phone numbers for their main location, satellite locations, various departments and even a map to find them. If you scroll down below that you will see a short history of the station, which is said to have begun on September 13, 1999. This certainly hampers their credibility, as I prefer to get my news from reliable sources that have been around decades. Further hampering their credibility is what you learn next, they are owned and operated by Time Warner Cable of Austin.

With little history to exemplify objective reporting and being owned by a large conglomerate I question News 8 Austin’s website credibility. It is too hard to be sure whether they skew their reporting based on personal politics or the politics of the company which owns them.