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

Anything driving RSS adoption is a good thing.

[mrRay720]

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.

Roll Your Own Newspaper

[Doc Ruby]

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.

And why shouldn't they?

[tobybuk]

They are the ones who pay for the news stories, why shouldn't they do this.

Re:And why shouldn't they?

[Slack3r78]

Agreed. This is a great example of an industry taking on the 'adapt' side of 'adapt or die' that we often chastise the RIAA and MPAA for trying to ignore. It sounds like this lets users and the newspapers make out fairly well in the end, as long as they don't try to turn it into some sort of spyware-like system.

New features.

[kschawel]

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

Re:Ummm..

[m50d]

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.