GMU Pop Culture Journalism

Website Response: Cambio

Cambio is an awesome, new website that The Jonas Brothers and AOL has just recently launched aiming towards tweens/teens. Unlike AOL’s other teen website, JSYK, Cambio focuses more on celebrities and celeb news, where as JSYK focuses on teen celebs and real teens too.

Because The Jo-Bros have a share in the website, Cambio gets a lot of exclusive video and news before a lot of other media outlets do. This makes it a handy website to go to get teen celebs news pronto.  Cambio also offers live chats and cool videos with teen stars like Selenz Gomez, Demi Lovato, and The Jonas Brothers too, which makes the website experience even better for teens.

The amounts of video and behind the scenes footage that Cambio has is definitely the website’s strongest point. Where it lacks at, is the news section and their content selection. The news section is located at the lower bottom right of the screen. Pretty hard to see huh? Cambio wants to be known as the best tween/teen site out there, yet all you see when you go to the home page is crazy amounts of video and a tiny link to the news section. The majority of people like video but some might be more interested in checking out the latest info compared to watching vids about The Jonas Brothers’ trip to Africa and Demi’s latest concert.

As for the site’s content selection, they tend to write about some topics that might not be teen enough. For example, you can’t talk about The Jonas Brothers and then about ‘Jackass’ without some audience members being offended, especially the teen’s parents. What I do understand is how drawing a fine line between what’s cool to a teen and what should be cool to a teen is hard to do. I figure because the site is somewhat new, that they are still juggling around to find what fits them and their audience best. Their  exclusive coverage, awesome behind the scenes interviews and videos and contests out weigh the facts that their news section is small and that some of their content is iffy for their audience.

If I wrote for Cambio, I’d want to write for the news section, simply because I think it needs help. I think it’s important for teens to know that they have the info they have. If they were known for good celebrity news content then Cambio would be the first site teens go to when they want to know what’s going on.

I would also love to host one of the video segments, just because I think it’s a cool idea for them to mix the Internet with television broadcasting. It would be like the kids are watching the news when they come onto the site, but it would be celeb news of course.  If they made a news video broadcast that pops up when you get on the website, kids could listen to the latest star news while exploring other things on the website too. I do think this would be hard because of timing and having to tape, but it would just be an idea. Maybe it would be possible to do a weekly video round up of the best news of the week or something? Not sure.

Last, I think I would want to write more feature like stories. They don’t really have long feature stories on Cambio. Like I’ve mentioned it’s basically video and short news articles. It would be cool for them to have long in depth interviews or stories with stars and add more to the news section that way. It would make the website more newsworthy for teen celeb news.