The other day, I talked to the person who manages the feeds for a large daily newspaper.
The conversation turned to private-label newsreaders, which has become something of a mini-trend among newspapers this summer. This person told me, “I get a call every two to three weeks from somebody who has the best new private label newsreader. But I haven’t seen one that has great functionality.”
I’ve never been a fan of publishers getting into the business of writing or distributing any software that is not absolutely essential. Why lock yourself in when there is so much grassroots innovation in feed-reading going on right now?
However, I’m beginning to wonder if news publishers in particular shouldn’t be offering feed aggregation on their sites — particularly on their homepages.
With Google and My AOL testing RSS on their personalized pages, and My Yahoo already strong in the market, it may be time for publishers to contemplate aggregating one another.
But that may require rethinking licensing in a way that will make everyone’s head hurt.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Month: July 2005
The Denver Post has launched an RSS reader called News Hound “powered by NewsGator“, with a ton of feeds from their site.
News Hound emphasizes Denver Post feeds over others, and pre-filtered feeds over ones that the user chooses. You can add feeds from other sites in News Hound, but it’s a three-click process to add a feed that is not on their list. The good news is that I couldn’t seen any attempt to limit competition. While they weren’t easy to find, craigslist feeds were included when you search for feeds that mention Denver.
The News Hound application window itself is a nonstandard window that cannot be resized and devotes as much real estate to navigation as to information.
There’s an ad on the News Hound window. This doesn’t necessarily bother me, except there are plenty of ways for readers to get their feeds ad-free.
News Hound promotion page doesn’t mention “RSS”. (Thanks to Steve Outing writing at Poynter for noting this.) I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. RSS is a file format with a geeky name. This is clearly a product designed for medium and late adopters.
RSS lends itself to this kind of experimentation. After all, it makes no assumptions about how its information will be displayed by the reader. And it’s clear that the average reader hasn’t discovered the advantages of RSS feeds. A lot of early adopters haven’t jumped on this particular bandwagon yet. For those reasons, I think that News Hound is an interesting experiment.
But I’m still left wondering whether the average newspaper reader wouldn’t be happier reading their feeds on My Yahoo or Bloglines, or one of the existing RSS applications, if someone would show them how.
FOOTNOTE: I was involved in naming and launching an email alert service called “NewsHound” for the San Jose Mercury News in the early ’90s, which I know the folks at Poynter recall. I don’t remember whether we ever trademarked the name.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Publishers are still struggling understanding the meaning and implications of RSS syndication. Can they harness the power of syndication without winding up in the harness themselves?
This anxiety is illustrated by a dustup in Romenesko’s journalism weblog today. The LA Times (along with the Guardian) is beta testing Consenda’s private-label newsreader software.
This led the LA Business Journal to report, “Conceding that online readers want a smorgasbord of news rather than a limited menu, the Los Angeles Times is developing a new Web site that would include content from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other rival news sources.”
Well, not exactly. And the Times is understandably sensitive about the subtle distinction between creating an aggregation site and distributing RSS software (which will apparently feature contextual ads). The LA Times replied in a letter to Romenesko that no, they weren’t planning a site. They were going to distribute newsreader software.
Rather than let the matter die quietly, editor of the LA Business Journal emailed Romenesko, blaming the LA Times PR machine for blinding him with copy.
So let me get this straight — the Times is not using content from other news sources but it offers us a chance to “get perspective from other news sources.” Huh?
Seems like the PR department might not be in sync with the new media department.
This back-and-forth illustrates a problem that could vex only publishers. Can they welcome newsreader users while keeping other websites from aggregating their news? Can they distribute an ad-bearing newsreader while working themselves in a lather over other sites that sell ads on pages that contain their headlines? Is there any meaningful difference between an aggregator site and a newsreader? Is it a difference that you could explain to your mom or a PR copywriter — or a newspaper editor, for that matter?
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.
Weak quarterly results at major newspaper publishers, says Reuters, are partly due to declines in circulation because consumers have moved to do-not-call lists, seriously impairing newspapers’ efforts to sell. Then there was all that fraud about how many papers were actually distributed.
As a former magazine circulation manager who spent a few happy years building a major metro daily’s website, I’m not surprised. A lot of newspaper “readers” wouldn’t be getting the paper if they hadn’t been called. And a big share of the paid circulation of most newspapers is simply given away and is unlikely ever to have been opened.
The laws of physics dictate that in print, the components of the paper are irrevocably yoked. If craigslist kills classifieds and big boxes kill run-of-paper ads, what becomes of news?
The opportunity of networked media is that quality editorial can find its own market and generate quality ad inventory. The challenge is figuring out which of the rest of your content is desirable “long-tail” inventory and which is dross.
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Mobile, but going nowhere
I’ve always believed that top-level domains should be too cheap to meter. We should set up as many as we can, in order to get rid of the artificial scarcity that surrounds domain names in general. But that doesn’t mean we need a “.mobi” domain for mobile device websites right now.
As long as we pretend that TLD’s represent something special, we should treat them like they mean something. And I have no idea what .mobi means.
The idea that a “mobile” device for accessing the Internet is different from a “nonmobile” device will seem charmingly naive before we decide how to use this new TLD. The idea that a single domain could say something useful about the capabilities of the device and protocols accessing it was never charming.
Perhaps it could serve a similar purpose to the “.xxx” TLD — a good place to avoid while we’re gobbling up well-designed conventional websites and RSS feeds on the road.