Floating Island

This week, we are engaging with RSS feeds and news readers to consider how the new forms of content delivery and organization will affect news reading and reporting habits.

Four News Feeds

First, we all signed up for Google Reader accounts and were asked to try out the news feeds of four fairly different (in the online sense) news organizations.

1. The New York Times has one of the best feed pages around, and easily the best of this bunch. On the home page, there are links to the RSS page at the bottom and lower right of the page. It seems most sites put their orange RSS links somewhere around the margins of the page—this makes it easy for the reader to scan and find.

NYT easily offers more than two dozen major categories of news feeds, and many of these offer sub-categories for more specific news within a given area, all offered on a single page. For example, You can subscribe to a feed for the NYT’s renowned science coverage, or you can choose a specific area of science news—in this case, “earth,” “nutrition,” or “space” news. In the Google Reader, I subscribed to the feeds that are relevant for my courses and projects this term: world business, asia pacific, technology, arts and the magazine.

Unfortunately, for such an advanced site, it doesn’t yet seem possible to subscribe to feeds by author or columnist, a feature that J.D. Lasica has been looking forward to for close to three years.

2. At first glance, the BBC’s Feed Factory is a bit hard to grasp. I was expecting something similar to the NYT feed page (which is similar to what I’ve seen from other news organizations), whereby all the feeds are listed in a straightforward mannerr. Instead, the BBC’s page gives the most prominent positions to the feeds for BBC promos and entertainment news. To get to the list of feeds, you have to go either to the “feed finder” (I expected this to be a search function) or to the small, pale link that’s overshadowed by the cartoon image of a woman saying “feed me.”

Once on the feed page, there are over a dozen categories listed alongside large colorful icons. Most of these categories seem to be geared away from hard news and analysis. Instead there’s stuff like entertainment, lifestyle, teens, kids, sports, weather. In order to see the feeds available under a category, it’s necessary to click on a link and go to a separate page. I chose to subscribe to the week at a glance news feed, as most of the other categories weren’t too interesting to me.

Overall, it seems the BBC site is trying to appeal to users who have no experience with RSS and may not even know what it is. But it goes about this in an odd way, employing childish graphics and replacing quality news options with lifestyle topics, yet not in a particularly user-friendly manner.

3. The Standard offers its news feeds in the most bare-bones manner: two links (one XML and one RSS) along the middle-right side of the home page. At least it’s easy to find, and there’s no need to choose specific feeds. One click and you’re signed up for everything.

It appears that the Standard sends out its feeds in a categorical order, though. When I first signed up, all of the articles near the top were property-related, while further down was a slew of sport stories.

I also noted that while the XML feed seems to work well, I had previously tried using the RSS feed in the NetNewsWire reader and got nothing.

4. Given the SCMP’s status as the world’s most profitable newspaper (on a per-subscriber basis), it’s quite disappointing that they are taking so long to invest in their future. I’ve looked through the site many times, always hoping that I just missed the feed link. But no, there’s no text news feed, only a podcast feed.

News Readers vs. Websites

News readers offer great convenience and flexibility for obtaining and organizing news content from a broad array of sources. Yet, I notice that when I read news on a reader, I tend to scan headlines more and perhaps read fewer stories from any one source than if I went to the website. This makes me better informed in a superficial way and less informed in a substantive way.

I still like to visit some websites regularly, such as NYT, because I’m familiar with the layout and I like to see the different ways in which stories are featured and given prominence. I also worry that, by becoming overly reliant on news feeds, I will miss out on some interesting stories that are not within my usual range of interests or subscriptions

Feeds Will Change the Way We Read

Feeds make me feel as if I should be reading the news constantly, on a portable device such as a pocket PC or blackberry. The news reader format seems well suited to smaller screens as well.

As Lasica noted, we are still awaiting a number of features that will further revolutionize the way we receive and read our news. Features that allow us to better organize our content, such as tags, could have a similar impact on news readers as Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web had on the internet.

Feeds Will Change the Way We Report

In the future, feeds may affect reporting and presentation of news. As feeds take off, news organizations may place less emphasis on creating distinctive online content, and instead focus more on supplying news to news readers (the programs not the people). Perhaps it will open the way for more revenue as companies find a way to charge for feeds. And ultimately, they may need to find a way to insert advertising into the feeds to maintain profitability. We haven’t seen too much of this yet, but feeds may offer greater flexibility and control for advertisers as well.

I haven’t given much thought to how feeds would change my reporting and writing. It may force me to write catchier headlines, in hopes of attracting more interest in the story below. Or I may simply try to write more informative headlines and leads, aware that many readers will not read beyond the first few lines.