Slashdot Mirror
Newspapers To Offer Their Own News Aggregators
RedSteve writes "Wired News is reporting that several newspapers are about to take on news aggregators at their own game, offering their own branded newsreaders in direct competition with the likes of Google News. The Los Angeles Times, the Denver Post and British newspaper the Guardian will soon offer stand-alone newsreader software for reading stories on their own websites and those of their competitors. The move is apparently intended to capture the less tech-savvy news consumer who may not know what an RSS reader is, but know that their favorite paper now offers them a way to get lots of headlines from lots of places. Oh, and did I mention it allows the newspaper to maintain its brand and sell its own advertising based on what the user is viewing?"
Even people that don't seem to understand or care about RSS seem to have no problem with Live Bookmarks.
Perhaps we could get one for slashdot, and I could get a first post
Seriously, IMO RSS is one of the best things to hit the net since porn. Having the news come to me instead of me going to the news is like night and day. If it takes a few news vendors and their branding to popularise it, so be it, just as long as they don't bastardise the standard.
As long as no one I'm aggregating aggregates my aggregation of their their aggregations, we'll be fine. Otherwise we'll take the web down in a huge recursive aggregation fireball!
Agile Artisans
Too many people acting like it's some race to find out about the latest settlements being constructed in the west bank, how many russian soldiers were fragged in chechnya, how the stock market did every second of the day.. At the end of the day you've learned nothing and you've gotta start over tomorrow. I think it's time people put all this crap where it belongs, in the recycle bin.
This kind of service is like server-side RSS. Viewable in an already-installed browser, it will be much easier for the "less tech-savvy" user (99.9+% of media consumers) to use than some new, probably beta, app they'd have to install without support. If we developers can produce easily used, real RSS clients, with adequate support, these serverside aggregators will pave the way for people to take control of our news consumption. We've been promising people easily self-rolled Web "newspapers" almost as long as we've promised a "paperless office". This time, the papers might get down that road, if we play our cards right.
--
make install -not war
They are the ones who pay for the news stories, why shouldn't they do this.
Forces you to login to each aggregate site to read every headline.
:(
What happens when I have no blood or first born left?
liqbase
I guess the syndication software market hasn't been fought over as much as the browser, mail client and messaging app (cue resentment after downloading MSN Messenger 7 last night and being shocked by now ad-packed it was)
I suppose what's needed is a newsreader which can selectively block domains or Regular Expressions in the way that adblock for firefox can
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Oh well, I guess you could always patent the idea and retroactively sue them.
At first I thought, what could they possibly add that would make it more useful than Google? In the article it mentions classifieds:
Media companies will also use newsreaders to enable readers to more easily scan and search their classifieds, Ferguson said. Readers will be able to sign up for alerts about new listings, such as a car from a particular model year, he said.
I think that will be useful, but only when you are looking for something to buy. Other than that, what makes me want to switch over to their news reader? Granted, they do write the stories, but Google and Yahoo are not biased in what stories show up first, are they? Keith
So these local aggregators are being 'sold' to non-tech savv people who don't know about google news? Seems like a weird business model...since your kind of counting on no know telling them about a better service available at a different URL.
I think what is happening is a good thing rather than a bad one. Thanks to news aggregators, people can now read the same story from different sources to gather a balanced view.
Take the story about Britain banning Nigerians from entering Britain. Both press esc and BBC carries the story. But the BBC story is far more sympthatic to the British government than the PressEsc story, which is, if anything hostile to it. I bet the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Thanks to RSS feeds and new aggregators, I am able to make up my own mind.
I can understand why the big newspapers are worried. Thanks to RSS not-so-well-established but corporate interest free newspapers can get their news across to the people at large.
Nothing to see here
What the article doesn't make clear is whether or not this means that any of these three publications will make plain-vanilla RSS readily available. If they will, they'll have a hard time convincing people to use their own branded software. If not (e.g. if their RSS feeds are somewhat proprietary), they're shooting themselves in the foot. RSS is an established, working standard. The main complaint of many content providers over RSS is that it's not quite as ad-friendly as regular HTML content (this is a feature, not a bug, if you're a reader).
The Denver Post hasn't had an RSS feed all this time; if they finally post one, I might start reading them more regularly. If, on the other hand, I have to use their proprietary software for their proprietary RSS feed (which almost certainly will be a Windows 2K/XP only application), they'll see my readership decline 100%.
Better idea for content providers: give your readers Firefox and Sage to read your feeds. You'll be giving them a great RSS feeder and be doing them a favor by also providing them with a secure, standards-compliant web browser.
I would much rather see the option to control your own news sources on yahoo and google. One of my alerts is for "google" so you can imagine how many articles a day I get sent. It would be nice to only get feeds from say the top 10 newspapers.
Soon, there will be no content.
Only aggregators; and aggregators of aggregators.
So why would I want to look at a service like google news, but... run by a single media source?
If I trusted The Guardian to be consistently able to identify and produce the stories worth reading, I'd... read The Guardian.
Anyway two other things.
The Guardian already does something like this - it's called "The Editor", and appears daily in their paper. It's a full page spread which details columns, letters, and news coverage in papers and media around the world. Obviously you can't cover that much in a single page, but I'm pretty sure the Guardian also produces a weekly version of The Editor (although it might be printed under a different name) which you can buy.
I'd imagine their online service would use "The Editor" namesake.
Will they run into any legal troubles, etc.? I thought one of the reasons Google News is still 'beta' is because they can't figure a way to make money on it, without getting all the content providers (news sources) up in arms... Couldn't these new offerings anger the other news sources, and start up a war between provider and crawlers, etc? Don't know the answer...
My Sig is better than your Sig, because my Sig is Mine!
Polish biggest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, has been offering its own RSS aggregator for a few months. And they've been marketising it outside the Internet, which surprised me -- I've seen ads placed on city buses, for example.
Oh, and did I mention it allows the newspaper to maintain its brand and sell its own advertising based on what the user is viewing?
Seriously, can't you just look at the three sentences that you've written before this one and see that you haven't? Why ask rhetorical questions?
Yeah, you read right... it's a good idea, from the Newspaper's point of view.
Why not have an eMagazine (which is basicaly what this is) instead of a webpage? Why not have a reader that can provide _just their content_ and not the compititions, plus allow them to provide special ads and multimedia content?
From the point of view of the newspapers, this is the best idea to come from the internet... and they were inspired by the sucess of RSS.
Now, what can those of us, like most slashdot readers, do about formats that are _closing_ such as this? Compete. That's all we're allowed to do.
Come to think of it, there is one other problem with this idea: Unlike the web, you can't go from newspage to newspage to get diffrent points of view... Which is one of the reasons I enjoy reading news on the Web.
So, when the "New York Times Online" reader comes out, I'm sure it'll be popular with those who read the NYT. I'm also sure it'll be an initial success... We'll see where it goes from there.
Then maybe you should stop watching Fox News and look at a decent News service.
:P
Granted, probably not the best day to post this considering the top headlines are about the Royal Wedding and the Grand National, but, eh, it's usually better
What is this obit spam about Radio/Tv talk show hosts all about? Is it just a bizzare advertising campaign? I just figured the Springer one was a joke, but now I'm thinking someone actually paid money for this.
As the LA Times is currently learning.
What is RSS?
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf/resources /*
e s/Library_and_Information_Science/Technical_Servic es/Cataloguing/Metadata/RDF/Applications/RSS/
Annotated RDF Links page.*
http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Librari
RSS at the Google Directory.
It comes in handy when your getting into either a Usenet, or Slashdot argument.
The BBC?
Isn't that the one that, the one time they actually publicly called into direct question the government's motives in seeking war in Iraq, almost lost their charter and had to back down?
I'm not sure how much I can take them seriously.
"They are the ones who pay for the news stories, why shouldn't they do this."
There's one advantage to a custom version. They can reduce the need for all those login questions, and reduce the number of freeloaders.
But I already have my own news aggregator!
a dlines.pl
http://www.wirelesscouch.net/cgi-bin/headlines/he
Posted from the wireless couch.
Really, it does.
Is that easy enough?
I wonder why google doesn't have an rss service like yahoo does?
Before I got yahoo's feeds I searched high and low for google's - but as far as I can tell the only way to get it is by various screen scraper type progies.. A shame, really.
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
Most newspapers have a "World and National Headlines" section, with wire service reports. Some also have wire service sections like "Weird news" and such.
How is this any different than what they propose?
My beef with newspapers isn't lack of aggregate content but rather having to log in every time. Just let me load the web page or look at my live bookmarks without having to enter a stupid password or give them personal data and I'll be quite happy.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Maybe Sage should ship with Mozilla by default?
First post!
syndic8.com
It's a searchable list of rss feeds. Quite handy actually. I think there's another as well, but I forget the name.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
The next big wave, I think, will be once having abolished content by replacing it with aggregators, we begin to move from there into the creation of content through the aggregation of aggregators.
As an anology, this can work in the same way that lambda-calculus and set theory may be used to provide a basis for the integers. We may define the null aggregator, which contains no sites, as "one" and an aggregator which aggregates the "one" aggregator as "successor to one". From this point we are in a position to define the basic arithmetic operators in terms of RSS operations on aggregators.
Taking our lead from this concept we may define more complex data structures which themselves represent content. For a practical example we may imagine a rooted tree of aggregators, aggregating the aggregators beneath them, which when taken as a whole encode an XML document.
I think "content", once we find ways to represent and create it, will represent a major innovation the evolution of the internet.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Somehow, this reminds me of the Jesse Jackson quote: "I not only deny the allegations, I deny the alligator."
Advertising, advertising, let me think -- that had something to do with not having Firefox and the Adblock extention, didn't it...I dimly remember advertising...oh, those were the days, when Saddam was still in power, Hellboy was only a comic and BSD was still alive...sigh...to be young and foolish again...
The newspapers that I can commonly find in my area are already simply aggregates of wired news service reports -- with occasionally an extra sidebar written by some hapless freelancer.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
What's so hard about making RSS or Atom feeds available? Google News is just repackaging other peoples headlines, the outlets might as well let readers have a choice on how they want to view the content.
All the torrents you could want.
over 1,400 executives of companies with annual revenue around $250 to $500 million
Is that executives's pay or companies income?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Their approach looks much more like "adapt or kill" to me. "Adapt or die" supposes that the problem is here to stay. Those companies apparently believe the threat can be removed.
Won't this bring up some of the issues that Google avoids by not advertising on the service, and not actually being in the news business. That French place didn't really have a good complaint because google was just linking to other stories in the same vein, without any ads at all or trying to promote their own stories. Won't another news paper getting stories from other sites from pages with their brands and advertising open them to lawsuits? The other negative consequences for a news agency is that it will show how much of the stuff is from the AP and related organizations anyway.
The thing I really like about news.google.com is that you can get a variety of perspectives on a story. You can also quickly tell which stories are "canned press releases" and which are originals.
I can't imagine a corporate media company wanting you to see that. Surely they would only aggregate unique stories, or ones that agree nicely with their own spin on events. (with the possible exception of contradictary stories to their own that have no credibility)
An effective news aggregator, by definition, should be independent and not responsible for any of the actual stories or editorial content themselves.
On the other hand there are a lot of folks out there who don't want to know there are often contradictory and different interpretations of world events. Google's service may be shaking their world view and blowing gaskets, so there probably is a market for lopsided aggregation.
Probably a huge market actually. Just don't count me amongst them.
O=='=++