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.
As long as no one I'm aggregating aggregates my aggregation of their their aggregations, we'll be fine. Otherwise we'll take the web down in a huge recursive aggregation fireball!
Agile Artisans
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.
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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make install -not war
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
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
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.
I am trolling
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.
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.