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?"
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.
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.
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They are the ones who pay for the news stories, why shouldn't they do this.
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
Just use knewsticker or whatever, but it won't help you. The crazy thing is slashdot will ban you faster for repeatedly grabbing their RSS feed than for reloading the front page. It's such a tiny amount of data compared to the frontpage I don't see why they do that, but that's slashdot policy.
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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.
The aggregators are better. And I see it as more of offering you a viewing app, expanding their audience by letting people who don't know about it use it. Like some streaming radio sites will offer you their own player, or at least link to winamp. It's not because they want you to use their player, it's so that if you don't know wtf an m3u file is you can still use their service. Same idea here.
I am trolling
Soon, there will be no content.
Only aggregators; and aggregators of aggregators.
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...
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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.
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.
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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.