Some thoughts for the online jour­nal­ism stu­dents of the world …

One of the cool things about writ­ing for online pub­li­ca­tions like the Online Jour­nal­ism Review and Amer­i­can Jour­nal­ism Review is that I get a lot of com­ments and e-mails from folks around the world. And prob­a­bly two or three times a week I’ll get an e-mail from a stu­dent study­ing jour­nal­ism in Brazil, Swe­den, Aus­tralia, Switzer­land or else­where ask­ing for my two cents about the lat­est devel­op­ments in the online news indus­try, whether it’s fat, over­size ads, sub­scrip­tions, or Inter­net ethics.

Instead of carv­ing out an hour here or there, or blow­ing off a cour­te­ous request when I’m swamped with projects, I thought it would make sense to occa­sion­ally post my responses to some of the ques­tions I’m asked, given that they fre­quently overlap.

Today I sent a response to a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon in Eugene who asked these questions:

Do you agree that online pub­li­ca­tions still are not seen as cred­i­ble as more tra­di­tional print media?

I don’t agree with that premise. In fact, the most recent study by the Pew (june 2000) sug­gests just the oppo­site: that Amer­i­cans find the online arms of tra­di­tional news orga­ni­za­tions (CNN.com, USAToday.com, ABCNews.com) more cred­i­ble than their Old Media coun­ter­parts. See:

http://www.people-press.org/media00sec5.htm

What do you think of Salon and Slate?

I think they both do out­stand­ing work. While nearly all of the media atten­tion in the past year has focused on online pub­li­ca­tions’ prof­itabil­ity, the qual­ity of the jour­nal­ism on these sites — and a hand­ful of oth­ers like TheStreet.com — is superb.

No other pub­li­ca­tions com­bine new media savvy (inter­ac­tiv­ity, com­mu­nity, speed, buzz, con­trar­ian think­ing) with old media chops (old-fashioned reli­a­bil­ity, accu­racy, hit­ting tight turn­arounds when break­ing news hits). Will both sur­vive, given the odds against qual­ity con­tent sites? Who knows? But the Web will be poorer if either one perishes.

Did you coin the phrase ‘trans­ac­tion journalism’?

Yes, in a col­umn for the Amer­i­can Jour­nal­ism Review in 1997. It’s a trend that bears close scrutiny today as the pres­sure mounts on online pub­lish­ers to become prof­itable at any cost. As online adver­tis­ing dwin­dles, man­agers are look­ing at other rev­enue streams, such as e-commerce, spon­sored con­tent, busi­ness alliances and tiered pre­mium ser­vices. That’s all well and good, but the jour­nal­ists in posi­tions of author­ity need to make sure that clear lines of demar­ca­tion are drawn so that the edi­to­r­ial com­po­nent of news and con­tent sites is not com­pro­mised and the read­ers aren’t shortchanged.

What can online pub­li­ca­tions do to boost their credibility?

In many ways, online sites have more going for them than their offline coun­ter­parts. The best sites take advan­tage of the Net’s nat­ural assets: The Inter­net is non­lin­ear, let­ting us call up sto­ries, or drill down to related sto­ries, on our own time frame; it’s instan­ta­neous and con­ve­nient, with break­ing news only a mouse click away; it offers authen­ti­ca­tion value, let­ting reporters point users to source doc­u­men­ta­tion rather than telling them to just trust us; it offers alter­na­tive voices (and over­looked sto­ries) not found in the main­stream media; and, most crit­i­cally, it offers the poten­tial for inter­ac­tiv­ity and com­mu­nity, so that users can have a con­ver­sa­tion with con­tent cre­ators, or with each other, instead of being the recip­i­ent of what­ever crumbs are handed down by the impe­r­ial lords of big media.

I’ve just writ­ten a piece on online ethics and cred­i­bil­ity that will be pub­lished this sum­mer by the Quill mag­a­zine. I’ll men­tion it in this blog, and attach a url, when it’s pub­lished. (It’s here.)

J.D. Lasica is a free-lance online jour­nal­ist and for­mer new media direc­tor based in the San Fran­cisco area. Con­tact JD here.

This entry orig­i­nally appeared May 21, 2001, on my Manila blog.

Hello, gang. I’m a vet­eran jour­nal­ist and long­time blog­ger who’s mov­ing over to Mov­able Type from Manila. I’ll spend the next week set­ting up the tem­plates before I get down to daily postings.

JD Lasica

RSS: News that comes to you

RSS feeds offer info junkies a way to take the pulse of hun­dreds of sites

By J.D. Lasica

he explo­sion of weblogs and niche news sites poses a prob­lem for any
info-warrior: Who has time to read all this stuff?

Well,
here’s one pos­si­ble solu­tion: news read­ers — a new crop of soft­ware
pro­grams that fetch updated dis­patches from your favorite online
writ­ers, blog­gers or news outfits.

Instead
of the hunt and peck of Web surf­ing, you can down­load or buy a small
pro­gram that turns your com­puter into a vora­cious media hub, let­ting
you snag head­lines and news updates as if you were com­mand­ing the
anchor desk at CNN.

The pro­grams, which are just now mov­ing out of the techie world into the main­stream, come in a vari­ety of shapes and fla­vors: NewzCrawler (PC), AmphetaDesk (cross-platform), Radio User­land (PC or Mac), Net­NewsWire
(Mac), and oth­ers. Look beneath the hood and they’re all pow­ered by
XML, a souped-up form of HTML. The pro­grams check each site to see if
they con­tain RSS (Rich Site Sum­mary) tags, a set of HTML-like instruc­tions for shar­ing news.

Here’s how it works. You fire up one of the news read­ers (also called
news aggre­ga­tors), sub­scribe to cer­tain sites from a direc­tory of
thou­sands of choices — say, BBC Online, ESPN, Salon, the Chippewa
(Wis.) Her­ald and Bangkok News — and bingo, you’re in busi­ness.
When­ever you sign on, a direc­tory pane lets you see the most recent
updates for each chan­nel you’ve sub­scribed to. Within each chan­nel
you’ll typ­i­cally see a half dozen head­lines and per­haps a sum­mary, the
entire item, and occa­sion­ally an accom­pa­ny­ing photo. Want to dive in
fur­ther? Click on a link and you’re trans­ported directly to the
source’s Web site. Some pro­grams run through a Web browser, oth­ers
through a stand­alone pro­gram. Most are free.

The
orig­i­nal way of using news aggre­ga­tors, which seems to be quickly
falling out of favor, involves assem­bling a per­son­al­ized page of links
on a remote site.  Netscape helped pio­neer this — and, indeed,
engi­neered the ear­li­est ver­sion of RSS in 1999 as a way for users to
add news chan­nels to its My Netscape por­tal. Today, sites like Fyuze and Fresh­News have pig­gy­backed on the news aggre­ga­tion phenomenon.

But most users sim­ply sub­scribe to a news feed by click­ing on those lit­tle orange XML rec­tan­gles sprout­ing up on thou­sands of weblogs. You can also find thou­sands of other feeds by explor­ing  Syndic8 or New­s­Is­Free.

No,
this isn’t The Next Big Thing, and no, it won’t make Web
brows­ing obso­lete. But from a news publication’s van­tage point, RSS
allows a news site to instantly syn­di­cate its con­tent with­out any third
par­ties involved.  Inter­net news feeds give news orga­ni­za­tions another
way to
reach that most elu­sive of crea­tures: the wired, tech-savvy
pro­fes­sional. And you can bet that within a year or so, stu­dents will
be latch­ing onto RSS sub­scrip­tions in a big way.

The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor has been at the fore­front of the news indus­try in embrac­ing news read­ers, mak­ing sum­maries avail­able of its tech­nol­ogy, books, com­men­tary and other sec­tions and offer­ing an easy-to-understand primer on RSS for new­bies. The Monitor’s RSS feed of the entire day’s paper is the only one of its kind from a major publisher.

“I
look at the Web as an oppor­tu­nity to have a mil­lion door­ways to the
Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor,” says pub­lisher Stephen Gray. “I think of it
as a pro­gres­sion from one end, where it’s free, to the other end, where
it’s paid. The pipeline has to be really big at the out end to bring in
lots of begin­ners if you want to max­i­mize the num­ber of sub­scribers at
the other end.”

So
while other news pub­li­ca­tions sniff at RSS feeds — no adver­tis­ing! no
sub­scrip­tion fees! — the Monitor’s strat­egy is to incre­men­tally acquire
mind­share, to acquaint read­ers with the paper in small doses. RSS feeds
fit into that strat­egy, along with free daily e-mail head­line sum­maries
(30,000 sub­scribers), elec­tronic PDF files of the print edi­tion, mobile
news feeds, and 400 yearly appear­ances by Mon­i­tor staffers on TV and
radio stations.

The approach seems to be work­ing. The paper’s print cir­cu­la­tion is up
10 per­cent since the Sept. 11 attacks and Web site traf­fic has soared
four­fold to 2.3 mil­lion monthly vis­i­tors. RSS feeds make up only a
small frag­ment of total read­er­ship. The Mon­i­tor launched RSS feeds in
late Octo­ber and went to 9,000 RSS files served daily by the end of
Novem­ber. Today it’s up to 18,000. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s no way to
deter­mine how many read­ers that num­ber represents.

Though
the num­bers are still small, Gray notes the cost of pro­vid­ing the feeds
is essen­tially zero. “The con­tent is already made, and once that’s done
we need to chal­lenge our­selves to get it into somebody’s path so they
can engage with the Mon­i­tor in what­ever form suits them,” he says.

So
far, news orga­ni­za­tions or jour­nal­ists with news feeds include The New
York Times, ABCNews.com, MSNBC, BBC, ESPN, CNET News.com, Wired News,
Salon, Slate, The Fee­d­Room, Indy­Media, Google News, the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, the Spar­tan­burg (South Car­olina) Herald-Journal, blog­ger K. Paul Mallasch’s J-Log, Dan Gill­mor, Salon’s Scott Rosen­berg and British jour­nal­ist Ben Ham­mer­s­ley. Some
news aggre­ga­tors man­age to “scrape” the head­lines of cer­tain news
sites, like the Wash­ing­ton Post, USA Today, CNN, NPR, Asso­ci­ated Press
and Wall Street Jour­nal, enabling a sim­u­lated RSS feed. And some
aggre­ga­tors group news sources to pro­vide a regional news feed, such as Africa or the Mideast.

Dif­fer­ent uses for dif­fer­ent users

From
the user’s per­spec­tive, busy pro­fes­sion­als, jour­nal­ists and researchers
would seem to be ideal can­di­dates to embrace news reader tech­nol­ogy.
For tar­geted infor­ma­tion, RSS feeds will surely eclipse news alerts
once the tech­nol­ogy lets you parse the requested sub­ject mat­ter. But
already, a med­ical reporter could sub­scribe to an RSS feed and receive
updates pub­lished to a health data­base.

Ehud Lamm, a pro­fes­sor at the Open Uni­ver­sity of Israel, sub­scribes to
120 feeds and checks his news aggre­ga­tor three to five times a day. He
cherry-picks from a vari­ety of feeds: for­eign news (Inter­na­tional
Her­ald Tri­bune, BBC), blog­gers (InstaPun­dit, Script­ing News), obscure
sites like Snowdeal.org, and sites that plumb niche sub­jects like
lin­guis­tics and sociology.

“Aggre­ga­tors,
because of their instan­ta­neous nature, are addic­tive. It is hard to
start the day with­out check­ing what’s new,” he says in an inter­view by
e-mail. “I almost never visit sites reg­u­larly any­more. I still con­sume
other media quite vora­ciously, but when­ever a news story breaks, I run
to check the aggregator.”

Scot
Hacker, web­mas­ter for the UC Berke­ley Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism,
down­loaded Net­NewsWire (slo­gan: “More news, less junk. Faster.”) for a
class sev­eral months ago. “Within 10 min­utes time I became con­vinced
that RSS was going to become an incred­i­bly impor­tant piece of Web
pub­lish­ing,” he says. “I think of RSS like TiVo — it lets me spend the
same amount of time to take in a lot more media. For me it’s not about
speed, it’s about sav­ing time. I’m able to dis­till infor­ma­tion much
more efficiently.”

Roger
Turner, a free­lance soft­ware devel­oper in Lon­don who inspects his 218
news feeds five to 10 times a day, agrees. “Using a news aggre­ga­tor has
trans­formed the way I inter­act with the Web. News comes to me, on my
terms. I feel in touch with 10 to 100 times as many sites as before
RSS, with less effort.”

Bernard
Gold­bach, a tech­nol­ogy jour­nal­ist for The Irish Exam­iner, uses
Newzcrawler on his IBM note­book because it lets him print out digests
from 138 news sources in his con­stant for­ays around Ire­land. “I read
these printed copies when my eyes are tired or when cramped for space
on trains or buses,” he says. “Read­ing through aggre­ga­tion gives me a
sure-fire way of avoid­ing pop-ups, pop-unders and splash screens“
encoun­tered on most news sites.

Shayne Bow­man is another believer. Two-thirds of the traf­fic to his Hyper­gene Medi­a­blog
arrives through RSS feeds. After see­ing blog­gers copy and paste his RSS
blurbs into their weblogs, Bow­man now spends a bit more time spruc­ing
up the sum­maries that accom­pany each posting.

Bow­man,
a free­lance jour­nal­ist and designer, makes two pre­dic­tions: “I think
that RSS feeds will start replac­ing e-mail newslet­ters because they do
a bet­ter job of pro­vid­ing struc­ture and a more effi­cient means of
pars­ing through data.” And he sees rev­enue pos­si­bil­i­ties here. “RSS
could be a great way of dis­trib­ut­ing and read­ing clas­si­fied ad
infor­ma­tion, cus­tomized to the user’s pref­er­ences. If news media don’t
do this soon, eBay and Mon­ster will.”

To
reach truly large num­bers of users, news read­ers will need to become
inte­grated with other appli­ca­tions. Michael Krus, a Parisian who
started New­s­Is­Free three years ago with a col­league in Switzer­land
because he grew tired of surf­ing to the same sites every day, says he
thinks tying news read­ers to a Web browser, e-mail pro­gram or instant
mes­sag­ing pro­gram is the next log­i­cal step. “That would be a killer
app,” he says.

Among
the devel­op­ments already under way: The open-source Mozilla browser and
Netscape 7 come with side­bars that can dis­play RSS feeds. There are
news read­ers for hand­held devices, and one being tested now that uses a
ticker for­mat to
dis­play head­lines non-stop in the top line of your browser, like TV
Head­line News. Just double-click any head­line to read the story.

Per­haps
news read­ers will evolve into some­thing that has lit­tle to do with
news.  Sug­gests Turner: “The per­fect news reader won’t be a ‘news
reader’ — it’ll be an agent that medi­ates our inter­ac­tion with
per­son­al­ized bul­letins: aggre­gat­ing, fil­ter­ing, and pri­or­i­tiz­ing many
sources of chang­ing information.”

The medium could reshape the message

News
aggre­ga­tors may yet have unfore­seen effects on Web pub­lish­ing. User­land
Radio, for exam­ple, con­tains a lit­tle but­ton that lets you snag a news
item and repub­lish it on your weblog. Blog­gers say they’ve learned to
craft their weblog entries to write blurbs in the inverted pyra­mid
style and to craft straight­for­ward head­lines. Clever, ellip­ti­cal
treat­ments, or heads that depend on other visual ele­ments on a Web
page, don’t work when viewed in a news reader.

“The
New York Times movie reviews fail to men­tion the title of the work
dis­cussed — one must read the arti­cle to dis­cover it, which viti­ates
the use­ful­ness of a news reader,” observes Austin Bur­bridge, who
pub­lishes Cin­e­mamin­ima,
a digest of dig­i­tal movie news in Los Ange­les. “Worse, the entire
arti­cle, regard­less of length, is often included, which negates the
sum­mary func­tion of the news reader.”

One
of the chief virtues of news read­ers is that they pro­pel users into an
imme­di­ate online dia­logue, whether through e-mails, dis­cus­sion boards
or blog entries. Inter­ac­tiv­ity is much more vibrant when the news is
fresh. “News read­ers help to build com­mu­nity,” says Matthew Gif­ford, a
Web devel­oper in Bloom­ing­dale, Ill. “You can see the ebb and flow of
ideas around the net­work much bet­ter now.”

But
per­haps the biggest poten­tial impact of news read­ers is the prospect
that they will fur­ther level the play­ing field between Big Media and
indi­vid­ual con­tent cre­ators. “It’s all part of the democ­ra­ti­za­tion
effect of the Web,” says entre­pre­neur Dave Winer, who incor­po­rated an
early ver­sion of RSS in User­land soft­ware in 1999. “It puts blog­gers on the same field as the big news cor­po­ra­tions, and that’s great.”

Still,
Winer, with a trove of 130 RSS sub­scrip­tions, counts The New York Times
and BBC among his favorite feeds. “You go online for dif­fer­ent things,
and they do a good job cov­er­ing the news,” he says.

After
a few weeks of dab­bling with news read­ers, I’m a con­vert — though I’m
not quite ready to aban­don my Web surf­ing habits. I’ll doubt­less use
aggre­ga­tors increas­ingly in the years ahead, as the tools become
smarter. But I do think the news­room func­tion of con­text and
pri­or­i­tiz­ing can be lost when every head­line on the page car­ries the
same diminu­tive weight.

Says
pub­lisher Gray: “I absolutely agree. I’m a Web guy and spend two to
three hours a day online. But I don’t find it all that sat­is­fac­tory
when it comes to read­ing news. To my mind, the visual cues built into a
news­pa­per page are sub­lim­i­nal, but they’re an immense help as peo­ple
try to fig­ure out what’s rel­e­vant and impor­tant to them in the day’s
news.”

Many
users think oth­er­wise. Says Bur­bridge: “The great advan­tage of the news
aggregator-reader is that the dis­tract­ing ele­ments — chiefly
adver­tise­ments — are stripped away. Even news pho­tographs rarely add
any new infor­ma­tion to a story, and I count them as dis­trac­tions, too.”

For
news providers, it’s use­ful to remem­ber that infor­ma­tion stripped to
its bare essen­tials — that is to say, text — is what a great many
read­ers come for.

Some news reader programs:

NewzCrawler (PC)
AmphetaDesk (PC, Mac, Linux)
Net­NewsWire (Mac OS X 10.1)
Fee­dReader (PC)
User­land Radio (PC or Mac)
Head­line Viewer (PC)
Aggie News (PC)
Other news readers

Where to find news feeds:

Syndic8
New­s­Is­Free
(and its Press & Media cat­e­gory)
Moreover.com

This col­umn orig­i­nally appeared at the Online Jour­nal­ism Review.

RSS: News that comes to you

RSS feeds offer info junkies a way to take the pulse of hun­dreds of sites

By J.D. Lasica

he explo­sion of weblogs and niche news sites poses a prob­lem for any
info-warrior: Who has time to read all this stuff?

Well,
here’s one pos­si­ble solu­tion: news read­ers — a new crop of soft­ware
pro­grams that fetch updated dis­patches from your favorite online
writ­ers, blog­gers or news outfits.

Instead
of the hunt and peck of Web surf­ing, you can down­load or buy a small
pro­gram that turns your com­puter into a vora­cious media hub, let­ting
you snag head­lines and news updates as if you were com­mand­ing the
anchor desk at CNN.

The pro­grams, which are just now mov­ing out of the techie world into the main­stream, come in a vari­ety of shapes and fla­vors: NewzCrawler (PC), AmphetaDesk (cross-platform), Radio User­land (PC or Mac), Net­NewsWire
(Mac), and oth­ers. Look beneath the hood and they’re all pow­ered by
XML, a souped-up form of HTML. The pro­grams check each site to see if
they con­tain RSS (Rich Site Sum­mary) tags, a set of HTML-like instruc­tions for shar­ing news.

Here’s how it works. You fire up one of the news read­ers (also called
news aggre­ga­tors), sub­scribe to cer­tain sites from a direc­tory of
thou­sands of choices — say, BBC Online, ESPN, Salon, the Chippewa
(Wis.) Her­ald and Bangkok News — and bingo, you’re in busi­ness.
When­ever you sign on, a direc­tory pane lets you see the most recent
updates for each chan­nel you’ve sub­scribed to. Within each chan­nel
you’ll typ­i­cally see a half dozen head­lines and per­haps a sum­mary, the
entire item, and occa­sion­ally an accom­pa­ny­ing photo. Want to dive in
fur­ther? Click on a link and you’re trans­ported directly to the
source’s Web site. Some pro­grams run through a Web browser, oth­ers
through a stand­alone pro­gram. Most are free.

The
orig­i­nal way of using news aggre­ga­tors, which seems to be quickly
falling out of favor, involves assem­bling a per­son­al­ized page of links
on a remote site.  Netscape helped pio­neer this — and, indeed,
engi­neered the ear­li­est ver­sion of RSS in 1999 as a way for users to
add news chan­nels to its My Netscape por­tal. Today, sites like Fyuze and Fresh­News have pig­gy­backed on the news aggre­ga­tion phenomenon.

But most users sim­ply sub­scribe to a news feed by click­ing on those lit­tle orange XML rec­tan­gles sprout­ing up on thou­sands of weblogs. You can also find thou­sands of other feeds by explor­ing  Syndic8 or New­s­Is­Free.

No,
this isn’t The Next Big Thing, and no, it won’t make Web
brows­ing obso­lete. But from a news publication’s van­tage point, RSS
allows a news site to instantly syn­di­cate its con­tent with­out any third
par­ties involved.  Inter­net news feeds give news orga­ni­za­tions another
way to
reach that most elu­sive of crea­tures: the wired, tech-savvy
pro­fes­sional. And you can bet that within a year or so, stu­dents will
be latch­ing onto RSS sub­scrip­tions in a big way.

The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor has been at the fore­front of the news indus­try in embrac­ing news read­ers, mak­ing sum­maries avail­able of its tech­nol­ogy, books, com­men­tary and other sec­tions and offer­ing an easy-to-understand primer on RSS for new­bies. The Monitor’s RSS feed of the entire day’s paper is the only one of its kind from a major publisher.

“I
look at the Web as an oppor­tu­nity to have a mil­lion door­ways to the
Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor,” says pub­lisher Stephen Gray. “I think of it
as a pro­gres­sion from one end, where it’s free, to the other end, where
it’s paid. The pipeline has to be really big at the out end to bring in
lots of begin­ners if you want to max­i­mize the num­ber of sub­scribers at
the other end.”

So
while other news pub­li­ca­tions sniff at RSS feeds — no adver­tis­ing! no
sub­scrip­tion fees! — the Monitor’s strat­egy is to incre­men­tally acquire
mind­share, to acquaint read­ers with the paper in small doses. RSS feeds
fit into that strat­egy, along with free daily e-mail head­line sum­maries
(30,000 sub­scribers), elec­tronic PDF files of the print edi­tion, mobile
news feeds, and 400 yearly appear­ances by Mon­i­tor staffers on TV and
radio stations.

The approach seems to be work­ing. The paper’s print cir­cu­la­tion is up
10 per­cent since the Sept. 11 attacks and Web site traf­fic has soared
four­fold to 2.3 mil­lion monthly vis­i­tors. RSS feeds make up only a
small frag­ment of total read­er­ship. The Mon­i­tor launched RSS feeds in
late Octo­ber and went to 9,000 RSS files served daily by the end of
Novem­ber. Today it’s up to 18,000. Unfor­tu­nately, there’s no way to
deter­mine how many read­ers that num­ber represents.

Though
the num­bers are still small, Gray notes the cost of pro­vid­ing the feeds
is essen­tially zero. “The con­tent is already made, and once that’s done
we need to chal­lenge our­selves to get it into somebody’s path so they
can engage with the Mon­i­tor in what­ever form suits them,” he says.

So
far, news orga­ni­za­tions or jour­nal­ists with news feeds include The New
York Times, ABCNews.com, MSNBC, BBC, ESPN, CNET News.com, Wired News,
Salon, Slate, The Fee­d­Room, Indy­Media, Google News, the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, the Spar­tan­burg (South Car­olina) Herald-Journal, blog­ger K. Paul Mallasch’s J-Log, Dan Gill­mor, Salon’s Scott Rosen­berg and British jour­nal­ist Ben Ham­mer­s­ley. Some
news aggre­ga­tors man­age to “scrape” the head­lines of cer­tain news
sites, like the Wash­ing­ton Post, USA Today, CNN, NPR, Asso­ci­ated Press
and Wall Street Jour­nal, enabling a sim­u­lated RSS feed. And some
aggre­ga­tors group news sources to pro­vide a regional news feed, such as Africa or the Mideast.

Dif­fer­ent uses for dif­fer­ent users

From
the user’s per­spec­tive, busy pro­fes­sion­als, jour­nal­ists and researchers
would seem to be ideal can­di­dates to embrace news reader tech­nol­ogy.
For tar­geted infor­ma­tion, RSS feeds will surely eclipse news alerts
once the tech­nol­ogy lets you parse the requested sub­ject mat­ter. But
already, a med­ical reporter could sub­scribe to an RSS feed and receive
updates pub­lished to a health data­base.

Ehud Lamm, a pro­fes­sor at the Open Uni­ver­sity of Israel, sub­scribes to
120 feeds and checks his news aggre­ga­tor three to five times a day. He
cherry-picks from a vari­ety of feeds: for­eign news (Inter­na­tional
Her­ald Tri­bune, BBC), blog­gers (InstaPun­dit, Script­ing News), obscure
sites like Snowdeal.org, and sites that plumb niche sub­jects like
lin­guis­tics and sociology.

“Aggre­ga­tors,
because of their instan­ta­neous nature, are addic­tive. It is hard to
start the day with­out check­ing what’s new,” he says in an inter­view by
e-mail. “I almost never visit sites reg­u­larly any­more. I still con­sume
other media quite vora­ciously, but when­ever a news story breaks, I run
to check the aggregator.”

Scot
Hacker, web­mas­ter for the UC Berke­ley Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism,
down­loaded Net­NewsWire (slo­gan: “More news, less junk. Faster.”) for a
class sev­eral months ago. “Within 10 min­utes time I became con­vinced
that RSS was going to become an incred­i­bly impor­tant piece of Web
pub­lish­ing,” he says. “I think of RSS like TiVo — it lets me spend the
same amount of time to take in a lot more media. For me it’s not about
speed, it’s about sav­ing time. I’m able to dis­till infor­ma­tion much
more efficiently.”

Roger
Turner, a free­lance soft­ware devel­oper in Lon­don who inspects his 218
news feeds five to 10 times a day, agrees. “Using a news aggre­ga­tor has
trans­formed the way I inter­act with the Web. News comes to me, on my
terms. I feel in touch with 10 to 100 times as many sites as before
RSS, with less effort.”

Bernard
Gold­bach, a tech­nol­ogy jour­nal­ist for The Irish Exam­iner, uses
Newzcrawler on his IBM note­book because it lets him print out digests
from 138 news sources in his con­stant for­ays around Ire­land. “I read
these printed copies when my eyes are tired or when cramped for space
on trains or buses,” he says. “Read­ing through aggre­ga­tion gives me a
sure-fire way of avoid­ing pop-ups, pop-unders and splash screens“
encoun­tered on most news sites.

Shayne Bow­man is another believer. Two-thirds of the traf­fic to his Hyper­gene Medi­a­blog
arrives through RSS feeds. After see­ing blog­gers copy and paste his RSS
blurbs into their weblogs, Bow­man now spends a bit more time spruc­ing
up the sum­maries that accom­pany each posting.

Bow­man,
a free­lance jour­nal­ist and designer, makes two pre­dic­tions: “I think
that RSS feeds will start replac­ing e-mail newslet­ters because they do
a bet­ter job of pro­vid­ing struc­ture and a more effi­cient means of
pars­ing through data.” And he sees rev­enue pos­si­bil­i­ties here. “RSS
could be a great way of dis­trib­ut­ing and read­ing clas­si­fied ad
infor­ma­tion, cus­tomized to the user’s pref­er­ences. If news media don’t
do this soon, eBay and Mon­ster will.”

To
reach truly large num­bers of users, news read­ers will need to become
inte­grated with other appli­ca­tions. Michael Krus, a Parisian who
started New­s­Is­Free three years ago with a col­league in Switzer­land
because he grew tired of surf­ing to the same sites every day, says he
thinks tying news read­ers to a Web browser, e-mail pro­gram or instant
mes­sag­ing pro­gram is the next log­i­cal step. “That would be a killer
app,” he says.

Among
the devel­op­ments already under way: The open-source Mozilla browser and
Netscape 7 come with side­bars that can dis­play RSS feeds. There are
news read­ers for hand­held devices, and one being tested now that uses a
ticker for­mat to
dis­play head­lines non-stop in the top line of your browser, like TV
Head­line News. Just double-click any head­line to read the story.

Per­haps
news read­ers will evolve into some­thing that has lit­tle to do with
news.  Sug­gests Turner: “The per­fect news reader won’t be a ‘news
reader’ — it’ll be an agent that medi­ates our inter­ac­tion with
per­son­al­ized bul­letins: aggre­gat­ing, fil­ter­ing, and pri­or­i­tiz­ing many
sources of chang­ing information.”

The medium could reshape the message

News
aggre­ga­tors may yet have unfore­seen effects on Web pub­lish­ing. User­land
Radio, for exam­ple, con­tains a lit­tle but­ton that lets you snag a news
item and repub­lish it on your weblog. Blog­gers say they’ve learned to
craft their weblog entries to write blurbs in the inverted pyra­mid
style and to craft straight­for­ward head­lines. Clever, ellip­ti­cal
treat­ments, or heads that depend on other visual ele­ments on a Web
page, don’t work when viewed in a news reader.

“The
New York Times movie reviews fail to men­tion the title of the work
dis­cussed — one must read the arti­cle to dis­cover it, which viti­ates
the use­ful­ness of a news reader,” observes Austin Bur­bridge, who
pub­lishes Cin­e­mamin­ima,
a digest of dig­i­tal movie news in Los Ange­les. “Worse, the entire
arti­cle, regard­less of length, is often included, which negates the
sum­mary func­tion of the news reader.”

One
of the chief virtues of news read­ers is that they pro­pel users into an
imme­di­ate online dia­logue, whether through e-mails, dis­cus­sion boards
or blog entries. Inter­ac­tiv­ity is much more vibrant when the news is
fresh. “News read­ers help to build com­mu­nity,” says Matthew Gif­ford, a
Web devel­oper in Bloom­ing­dale, Ill. “You can see the ebb and flow of
ideas around the net­work much bet­ter now.”

But
per­haps the biggest poten­tial impact of news read­ers is the prospect
that they will fur­ther level the play­ing field between Big Media and
indi­vid­ual con­tent cre­ators. “It’s all part of the democ­ra­ti­za­tion
effect of the Web,” says entre­pre­neur Dave Winer, who incor­po­rated an
early ver­sion of RSS in User­land soft­ware in 1999. “It puts blog­gers on the same field as the big news cor­po­ra­tions, and that’s great.”

Still,
Winer, with a trove of 130 RSS sub­scrip­tions, counts The New York Times
and BBC among his favorite feeds. “You go online for dif­fer­ent things,
and they do a good job cov­er­ing the news,” he says.

After
a few weeks of dab­bling with news read­ers, I’m a con­vert — though I’m
not quite ready to aban­don my Web surf­ing habits. I’ll doubt­less use
aggre­ga­tors increas­ingly in the years ahead, as the tools become
smarter. But I do think the news­room func­tion of con­text and
pri­or­i­tiz­ing can be lost when every head­line on the page car­ries the
same diminu­tive weight.

Says
pub­lisher Gray: “I absolutely agree. I’m a Web guy and spend two to
three hours a day online. But I don’t find it all that sat­is­fac­tory
when it comes to read­ing news. To my mind, the visual cues built into a
news­pa­per page are sub­lim­i­nal, but they’re an immense help as peo­ple
try to fig­ure out what’s rel­e­vant and impor­tant to them in the day’s
news.”

Many
users think oth­er­wise. Says Bur­bridge: “The great advan­tage of the news
aggregator-reader is that the dis­tract­ing ele­ments — chiefly
adver­tise­ments — are stripped away. Even news pho­tographs rarely add
any new infor­ma­tion to a story, and I count them as dis­trac­tions, too.”

For
news providers, it’s use­ful to remem­ber that infor­ma­tion stripped to
its bare essen­tials — that is to say, text — is what a great many
read­ers come for.

Some news reader programs:

NewzCrawler (PC)
AmphetaDesk (PC, Mac, Linux)
Net­NewsWire (Mac OS X 10.1)
Fee­dReader (PC)
User­land Radio (PC or Mac)
Head­line Viewer (PC)
Aggie News (PC)
Other news readers

Where to find news feeds:

Syndic8
New­s­Is­Free
(and its Press & Media cat­e­gory)
Moreover.com

This col­umn orig­i­nally appeared at the Online Jour­nal­ism Review.