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

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.