As we are living in the age of internet, most of the news organisations publish news on their websites. You might ask, “what’s the difference between reading the news on newspaper and on the internet?” Well, internet offers many more new features to complement traditional news reporting than merely providing a new platform for publication. One of the most distinctive features is “news feeds“.
News feeds allow subscribers to read the news from the news organisations easily on a browser, through a technical format called XML by the system RSS which usually stands for “Really Simple Syndication”.
Let’s look at the news feeds function on the websites of some of the news organisations.
The front page of The New York Times website contains a quite noticeable RSS icon, although it is at the bottom area of the page. When you click the icon, you will be taken to another page that contains the NYTimes.com RSS feeds. There are different categories of feeds separated by different sections of The New York Times. Readers can tailor-make their feeds by subscribing to only the sections they are interested in reading. I think this design makes sense, considering The New York Times is one of the newspaper with richest content. If they do not separate the feeds by sections, the browsers of the subscribers might be turned into a mess.
While for BBC.co.uk, the feeds are also separated by different categories in its “Feed Factory”. However, they are further separated into a number of sub-categories within the same section, which allows the subscribers to further tailor-make their own news subsciptions. Moreover, there are plenty of RSS icons right below the top stories on the front page. Readers of BBC.co.uk can easily find them and subscibe to the categories they are of interest while reading the headlines of the stories.
The news feeds function can also be found on the front page of The Standard’s website. However, the news feeds function of The Standard does not allow readers to subscribe to only the sections of the newspaper which they are of interest. When a person subscribe to its news feeds, all of the news published on the website of The Standard will pop up in the browser.
The South China Morning Post does not provide its readers with news feeds services. Nevertheless, they do offer their readers a podcast function and an E-newsletters function which are somewhat similar to news feeds.
As I have mentioned before, news feeds give readers a whole new experience of reading the news on the internet. It saves your time by giving you a personalised browser to read news, as pointed out by J．D. Lasica in “Surf’s Down as More Netizens Turn to RSS for Browsing”.Subscribers do not need to go to the websites of the news organisations to read the latest news. All they need to do is open their browsers, for instance, Google Reader, to check out the news. For some news organisations, such as The New York Times and BBC which give subscribers the option to subscribe only to the categories of news they are interested in, people now do not need to click through the websites of various news organisations to find the news they want. News is now aggregated into a single interface. Readers can read the news from different news organisations without the need to open many browsers at the same time.
Google Reader, one of the news feeds browsers, also allows users to categorise or put tag on different news stories, so that they are able to search the news stories with similar content very easily, thus allowing users to create a single personal database containing all the news stories they need.
However, one of the downsides of news feeds is that most of the news organisations do not include relevant pictures or videos in the news stories they send to the subscribers’ newsreaders, which is not enough in my opinion.
Also, as Amy Gahran writes on her blog “Why I Ditched Most of My Feeds, and Changed to Net News Wire”, although news feed might bring much convenience to its users, the news feeds browser might become messy gradually when the user is subscribing to too many news organisations, even when he or she has already put stories into different categories. The users end up ignoring many stories as there are so many stories pop up on their browsers everyday.
Moreover, websites of the news organisations are more than “online version” of the newspaper or TV news programmes. Many of the news organisations’ websites actually contain various features aim at enhancing the interactions bewteen the organisation and its readers, such as forums, message boards and chatrooms. If people are only using news feeds to read news without surfing on the websites, they would not use those functions and give the organisation what their opinions are.
As for myself, news feeds has definitely changed the way I get information on the internet. I think it is a very good complement to both traditional news-reading on the websites and searching information on Google and Yahoo!. I can first read the latest news on news feeds browser and then go to the websites of the news organisation which publishes the stories that I think would contain interesting pictures or videos, or that I want to express my opinions regarding the stories to the organisations. Also, if I need to search some information on the internet, I can search it both from search engines and the browser since the browser allows me to find the relevant news stories very easily.
Since there will be many news stories, which report similar kind of news and pop up on the newsreaders everyday, if the users have subscibed to more than one news organisations, competition between different news organisations will become even keener. In order to increase the awareness of the stories among readers, journalists might need to come up with more eye-catching and exaggerating headlines and leads for their stories. Furthermore, unlike what they do on their websites, news organisations are not able to put advertisements on the news feeds browsers. If readers choose only to read news on the browser without going to the websites of the organisations, opportunity of earning revenues from advertisements will certainly be reduced.
News feeds surely benefit the readers, but for news organisations, it might be a risk. However, every risk brings new opportunities. News organisations should find the best way to cope with it and exploit this feature.
3 Comments
February 12, 2007 at 6:49 pm
[...] and sharing function of internet is weakened by Newsreaders to a degree. And I strongly agree one of our classmates says in his blog that “if readers choose only to read news on the browser without goes to the websites of the [...]
February 15, 2007 at 8:01 am
Good synthesis of the different ways that the four different news organizations use feeds (or not). You make some good points about the implications. Although I would point out that many news organizations only put headlines and a short summary in their feeds, forcing people to visit their website and see the ads (and pictures). Also, though you are not aware some people do actually put ads in their feeds. I’ll show an example of that in class. You guys weren’t expected to know about it since many are just discovering feeds but it’s worth pointing out.
February 16, 2007 at 12:18 am
[...] on the boring user interfaces, or a need for more graphics and multimedia elements (see Ken and Adrian ) show that there’s quite a bit to be done before RSS feeds are maximized. In an article about [...]