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

One better!

[jarich]

I'm going to write an aggregator-aggregator! I'll aggregate their aggregations!

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!

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.

Bad Article

[amigoro]

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.

The Guardian

[lxt]

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.