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Newspapers To Offer Their Own News Aggregators

Posted by Zonk on from the rolling-your-own dept.

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?"

7 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. They should just point them to Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Even people that don't seem to understand or care about RSS seem to have no problem with Live Bookmarks.

  2. How much news do we really need? by Adult+film+producer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Adblocking over RSS/newsreader by CdBee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  4. Bad Article by amigoro · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This ain't true. With RSS you can only see headline and if the source so wishes, a brief discussion. The user will have to get the news from the horses mouth.

    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
  5. :scratches head: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The reason I read news.google.com is because I don't want the bias of a single media source picking and choosing the sorts of things I look at.

    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.
    1. MSN already does this. Their news aggregator is basically a "and here's some other stories" link for MSN news. But I guess they're hardly a media source.
    2. It's been widely hypothesized the reason google news isn't out of beta is that google is afraid if they received direct profit for Google News they would find it harder to establish fair use over their news snippets. It will be hard for The Guardian not to claim they get direct profit from their news aggregator. How is this going to work?
  6. My rewsreader talks to me... by gov_coder · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  7. Re:Anything driving RSS adoption is a good thing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    RSS 'standard'? The people behind RSS can't get their act together. There are multiple versions of RSS that aren't directly compatible, and the versioning doesn't even make sense.

    ATOM is so much cleaner and IMHO more powerful because of this. But I agree in general that increases in the usage of these syndication systems are great.