This is what CNN looked like on 9/11:
http://i.imgur.com/tqnVwp6.jpg
All the major sites switched to something like this when the internet slowed to a halt. I assume they've always had a minimal version ready in case something like it happens again.
Re:Text-only CNN
by chrissnell on Sunday September 10, 2017 @09:52AM
(#15212211)
I was working at AOL Time Warner on 9/11 and our team helped out the CNN team to keep that site online. It was a crazy experience. I recall that Sun Microsystems had provisioned a huge datacenter room full of gear for another AOL project as a sort of "try before you buy" deal. We spent the afternoon kickstarting those machines and bootstrapping them as CNN content servers. It was a huge struggle just to keep everything online, given the massive surge in traffic that we were seeing. America had never seen an event like this since Pearl Harbor and most people didn't know what to do besides standing in front of a TV or--if you were at work--refreshing CNN all day. The idea of infra capacity to handle a news event of this magnitude wasn't something that had even been considered prior to 9/11.
Well thank you. I was in a college computer lab reading CNN's web page.
I'd pay $5/month for a reputable news site to provide this all year long.
http://www.npr.org ?
It's not text only but it's considerably more minimal than most news websites, loads almost instantly, doesn't have auto play content, and is considered a reputable source.
The BBC used to be similar but their international website is awful now (slow to load, more adverts, and less emphasis on actual news).
It's text-only when you use http://thin.npr.org
The full npr.org provides transcripts for many or all of their stories. This site leads me to stories that only contain bylines and no other content. Seems like a bug to not include at least a link to the audio or the transcript.
Re:Text-only CNN
by ricardobeat on Sunday September 10, 2017 @02:20PM
(#15213471)
Funny how the main site loaded much faster than this version for me. Wonder if it does reverse with a 2G connection.
Surprisingly long load times...
Just use ublock origin in advanced mode and disable third party everything. Most sites look completely broken until you find and enable their one cdn (and only that!), meanwhile 100 other requests stay blocked. Save those rules as you go and it's easy browsing from then on!
Re:Text-only CNN
by pavel_lishin on Sunday September 10, 2017 @01:45PM
(#15213311)
If you send me $5/month, I'll come over and turn Javascript off in your browser.
remember when rss was going to give us this?
RSS does give us this.
http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss
TinyTinyRSS and Fever make it a pretty good experience too.
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/906821174805630976
I'm not sure if the reason behind this is because of possible weak phone connections or that the hurricane is a good way to promote the text only site, but either way, huge shoutout to CNN for going forward with this themselves.
I've thought for a while about scraping news sites to just show their text, or something like classifying articles based on their subjects from different ones. On this front, they did it first.