This week, we discussed about “news feeds” in our new media class.
News feeds allow people to read news from different news organisations easily on a browser, through a format called XML and the RSS system.
As pointed out by Janice in her blog, RSS is still a new technology which is not very well-known to many. She included a survey on the popularity of RSS among bloggers, and found out that only 11% of the interviewed bloggers use RSS, while 66% of them do not know what it is.
There are several issues regarding news feed that are observed by our classmate.
Nearly all the MJ students talk about the time-saving and convenient nature of news feeds on their blogs. It is because newsreaders enable us to use a single interface to read news from different news organisations. Kumar thinks that this saves time as a lot of news headlines can be read simultaneously without the need to visit the websites of the news organisations that publish the news.
Our classmates also point out the instant nature of news feeds. Sky suggests that it is easier to read news constantly on portable devices that are connected to the internet. Toafay06 says that using news feeds is a clever way of keeping ourselves constantly updated on the latest news, since the newsreaders will update itself. Jonathan thinks that this makes breaking news more urgent, as readers will expect to be informed about the latest news as it breaks. However, Kingcreole argues that news feed will lose its instant nature if the users do not have their newsreaders ready all the time.
News feed can also create a personalised newspaper for users, since they can subscribe to the categories or sections of the newspaper or TV programmes they are interested in, and have a tailor-made newspaper especially for them. Joyce says that news feed makes online news-reading more individual. Ken suggests that it provides the readers with all the news in a specific category in a ‘wholesale’ manner. Sylvia also points out that users can now create tags in the newsreaders that help them search in their self-created database.
Although there are many benefits of using news feeds, there are a number of disadvantages of using it to read news. One of them is the readers’ reading habit is limited to only the sections they subscribe to. Peter feels it is important to read news that are not what you are usually interested in, especially when we are prospective journalists.
Some of our classmates are overwhelmed by the huge amount of news popping up on the newsreaders everyday. In the end, they might just skim through the headlines and leads without reading the full stories. Sylvia quoted John Quain’s article and tells us that people subscribing to too many news feeds feel that they cannot manage them and finally skimming through the headlines. Ken thinks that since not everything transferred to your browser is useful to you, you might become confused by the many news scramming into your browser.
Users can organise their subsciptions in some of the newsreaders, such as the Google Reader, quite easily by using the folder features. Nevertheless, when they are subscribing to too many feeds, their newsreaders may become very messy and difficult to manage. Nick says that he is disappointed by the difficulties in organising and prioritising the feeds. Hiutm suggests that the users should understand a little bit about categorising or librarianship in order to make the newsreader a tidier place.
In addition, like what Nick has emphasized, priority of news is absent in the news feeds. He says, “When I’m on the NYT site, I always read the headline article first, but in the reader, it is difficult to instinctively distinguish what would be front-page news from back-page news.” This is a common phenomenon to all of us actually. In the past, we use to pay more attention on the front page of the paper or the electronic version of it, either way would provide us the most significant news the society is focusing on. But now, we have to rely on our own judgments among leads and summaries. Janice in her blog comments that, “I enjoy clicking to news website such as BBC, New York Times, because I want to know what their headnews are, because it gives you an idea of the journalistic judgment of a news organization.”
Another discouraging feature of the news feeds is that in most of them, graphics do not come along. As a result, what we read will solely be words. This is actually tiring to many readers therefore one of our classmates, Christina asks in her blog, “Is it possible to integrate graphics as well as audio and video clips into a feed reader? Please, we’re visual animals.” Yes, modern readers are visual animals, we are not easily satisfied by the convention way with nothing but simply words.
Other than all these pros and cons of news feeds, how about probable changes and improvements they could bring forth?
First, it will be convenience in the sense that we could actually share among friends and schoolmates for our news feeds which our teacher for this New Media Workshop course, Rebecca, had also mentioned last week. By exporting an OPML file, not only could we jump from a reader to another, we could actually share the feeds we are reading. This is going to bring remarkable changes to schools and newsrooms because teachers and editors could easily assign their students and reporters how they need to read.
Another improvement that could be done is the news organizations should think of how to fully utilize the internet resources. Like what Christina questions in her blog, as there are “No pictures, no advertisements, no splash screens…no distractions to our readers, we can simply get the essentials and move on, despite that we know everything skin-deep” Perhaps much more could be done by the news organizations when the news feeds are delivered, if not, like what some of our classmates comment, that it only sounds like reading wired news when we read our feeds.
One question some of us do concern is, where are the revenues generated? This is actually going to change the journalistic world even more. Currently news organizations are suffering from a significant drop of revenue generated from advertisements printed on hard copies, with news feeds which often come with little or even no advertisements; the situation is likely to deteriorate. Joyce mentions that she strongly agree with one of our classmates, whom is me myself, saying in here that “If readers choose only to read news on the browser without going to the websites of the organizations, opportunity of earning revenues from advertisements will certainly be reduced.…for news organizations, it might be a risk”. (Joyce continued by saying that “No advertisements are really good for the readers but for news organizations and the IT companies, it might not be that optimistic.”)
Actually there are other suggestions that are quite urgent, such as improving interactions between the news feeds and readers. But above all, I think some lines from Wilson would be best to conclude the changes news feeds are going to bring along. He says that, “The news organizations will become even keener in beating one another in breaking news because feeds are as much about efficiency as they are about convenience. Headlines will become even more important because they are the first element that competes for users’ attention among hundreds of other items in the newsreader. But at the end of the day journalistic values will remain the same despite technological innovations.”
