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?"

Comments

The Guardian

[lxt]

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.

Re:The Guardian

[Jon Chatow]

The weekly version is called, appropriately enough, The Weekly . It's mainly aimed at ex-pats, and is very good. I read it because it's an easier way to distill the world's news when you've got a real life to lead. (I'd spend the whole of my life reading the news if I could ;-).)

Nothing new in Poland

[j_hirny]

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.

Re:I am Ignorant

[karvind]

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.

Re:I am Ignorant

[MHobbit]

RSS is also known to stand for "RDF Site Summary".

For some odd reason I prefer that acronym over "Really simple syndication", even though RSS is simple.