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Newspapers To Offer Their Own News Aggregators 108

Posted by Zonk from the rolling-your-own dept.
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?"
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Newspapers To Offer Their Own News Aggregators More

Newspapers To Offer Their Own News Aggregators

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  • They should just point them to Firefox (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Even people that don't seem to understand or care about RSS seem to have no problem with Live Bookmarks.
    • Am I the only one who thinks that the live bookmarks feature is a monstrosity?

      Mixing up static links that I explicitly placed with dynamic links publishde by a 3rd party is crazy. The right place for RSS in a browser is a sidebar if anywhere. Better than that is a seperate app that just opens links in your browser - be that a full app or some form of a scrolling marquee.

    • I am a testament to that. I have never bothered with understanding RSS, but live book marks are really great for me. For example I have slashdot's feed always open, which lets me see what it new in the news and go to it without any hastle. Combining a list of headlines in the same application that you will use to view them is brilliant.

  • Ummm.. (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Perhaps we could get one for slashdot, and I could get a first post

    • Re:Ummm.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by m50d ( 797211 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:58PM (#12188379) Homepage Journal
      Just use knewsticker or whatever, but it won't help you. The crazy thing is slashdot will ban you faster for repeatedly grabbing their RSS feed than for reloading the front page. It's such a tiny amount of data compared to the frontpage I don't see why they do that, but that's slashdot policy.
      • The new one that can integrate with Kontact is called Akregator. You should always cache your headlines and update them every 40 minutes (or their limit + 5-10 minute window) to avoid getting banned from /.
        • The new one that can integrate with Kontact is called Akregator.

          I know. But I prefer knewsticker, with it just scrolling along the panel.

          You should always cache your headlines and update them every 40 minutes (or their limit + 5-10 minute window) to avoid getting banned from /.

          But you can reload the main html page much faster than that without getting banned, which seems insane. If I'm trying to first post I want to be reloading as frequently as possible, so I'll use the html page, let's say I'm refreshi

          • But you can reload the main html page much faster than that without getting banned, which seems insane.

            I cannot speak for them, but my thinking is they figure they are displaying ads (or charging for paid page views) every time the front page loads in a browser. On the other hand, they are not generating any revenue from RSS reloads and you know if there was no limit set some people would just reload the RSS feed every 5-10 seconds. Also, by far the most RSS reloads would/do not generate any clicks and pag

            • Mm, yes, the ads were the only reason I could think of. I agree that reloading the rss feed every 5-10 seconds would be too much, but I'd have thought so would doing that with the main page. People who are reloading the page every few seconds are hardly going to be looking at the ads, but if they're pay-per-view I suppose that doesn't matter. Anyway the rss feed is such a tiny amount of bandwidth I don't see why the limit is so large (30 minutes), but when it comes down to it it's their server.

  • Anything driving RSS adoption is a good thing. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrRay720 ( 874710 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:44PM (#12188301)
    Seriously, IMO RSS is one of the best things to hit the net since porn. Having the news come to me instead of me going to the news is like night and day. If it takes a few news vendors and their branding to popularise it, so be it, just as long as they don't bastardise the standard.
    • "IMO RSS is one of the best things to hit the net since porn" -- And in my opinion you're wrong mister!, NetCraft 0wNZ R55!
    • IMO RSS is one of the best things to hit the net since porn.

      And the weird thing about it is that porn didn't spur its adoption like it has for many other web technologies.

      Unless there are porn RSS feeds that I'm missing out on.

      (I just googled it. They exist.)

    • Re:Anything driving RSS adoption is a good thing. (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      RSS 'standard'? The people behind RSS can't get their act together. There are multiple versions of RSS that aren't directly compatible, and the versioning doesn't even make sense.

      ATOM is so much cleaner and IMHO more powerful because of this. But I agree in general that increases in the usage of these syndication systems are great.

  • One better! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jarich ( 733129 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:46PM (#12188311) Homepage Journal
    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!

  • How much news do we really need? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Adult film producer ( 866485 ) <van@i2pmail.org> on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:47PM (#12188312)
    Too many people acting like it's some race to find out about the latest settlements being constructed in the west bank, how many russian soldiers were fragged in chechnya, how the stock market did every second of the day.. At the end of the day you've learned nothing and you've gotta start over tomorrow. I think it's time people put all this crap where it belongs, in the recycle bin.

  • Roll Your Own Newspaper (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:47PM (#12188317) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • 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.

      It's been done. [bloglines.com] Bloglines is lowers the bar to RSS use slightly, but there's still too large of a barrier for most normal people to overcome. First you have to explain what RSS is, then copy the link to each RSS feed you want and paste it into Bloglines. If the site doesn't provide an explicit link to the feed (which they real
      • When it's so easy to use that the normals don't even distinguish between their RSS aggregation and a "website", then it's been done. The tech doesn't need improvement nearly as much as the packaging and marketing (ie, "user education"). When I can hit an HTML/HTTP website which installs an aggregator with a single click, with default aggregation "presets" and one-click substitution of sources, it will be easy enough to catch on. Maybe in Firefox, maybe in a dedicated RSS client that catches on like Kazaa ca
    • Maybe Sage should ship with Mozilla by default?
      • I think the installer stub should ship by default. When hitting a page with an RSS tag, or perhaps also one of a list of RSS-enabled sites, the installer should offer to install the client to consume it. And offer to config itself from one of a bunch of preset feed collections. In fact, RSS readers should include config distribution features, so I can easily send a friend my config, or ask my friend for one, or subscribe to a feed of configs. And have configs merge immediately on install, with undo and sele

  • And why shouldn't they? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tobybuk ( 633332 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:47PM (#12188320)
    They are the ones who pay for the news stories, why shouldn't they do this.

    • Re:And why shouldn't they? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Slack3r78 ( 596506 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:52PM (#12188350) Homepage
      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.
      • 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.

        Their approach looks much more like "adapt or kill" to me. "Adapt or die" supposes that the problem is here to stay. Those companies apparently believe the threat can be removed.

    • Because they didnt think of it & didnt want to until it was a success.
      Its the same old story with success breeding success.
  • Forces you to login to each aggregate site to read every headline.

    What happens when I have no blood or first born left? :(

  • Adblocking over RSS/newsreader (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:48PM (#12188326)
    I guess the syndication software market hasn't been fought over as much as the browser, mail client and messaging app (cue resentment after downloading MSN Messenger 7 last night and being shocked by now ad-packed it was)

    I suppose what's needed is a newsreader which can selectively block domains or Regular Expressions in the way that adblock [mozdev.org] for firefox can
    • (cue resentment after downloading MSN Messenger 7 last night and being shocked by now ad-packed it was)

      Get the Mess patch from http://www.mess.be. You'll thank me afterwards. It removes the ads and lots of other annoyances.

  • New features. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kschawel ( 823163 ) <slashdot AT li DOT ath DOT cx> on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:52PM (#12188349)
    At first I thought, what could they possibly add that would make it more useful than Google? In the article it mentions classifieds:

    Media companies will also use newsreaders to enable readers to more easily scan and search their classifieds, Ferguson said. Readers will be able to sign up for alerts about new listings, such as a car from a particular model year, he said.

    I think that will be useful, but only when you are looking for something to buy. Other than that, what makes me want to switch over to their news reader? Granted, they do write the stories, but Google and Yahoo are not biased in what stories show up first, are they? Keith
  • So these local aggregators are being 'sold' to non-tech savv people who don't know about google news? Seems like a weird business model...since your kind of counting on no know telling them about a better service available at a different URL.
    • The aggregators are better. And I see it as more of offering you a viewing app, expanding their audience by letting people who don't know about it use it. Like some streaming radio sites will offer you their own player, or at least link to winamp. It's not because they want you to use their player, it's so that if you don't know wtf an m3u file is you can still use their service. Same idea here.

  • Bad Article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by amigoro ( 761348 ) * on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:55PM (#12188367) Homepage Journal
    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 [mithuro.com] and BBC [bbc.co.uk] 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.

    • Re:Bad Article (Score:3, Informative)

      by wootest ( 694923 )
      With RSS you can only see headline and if the source so wishes, a brief discussion. Big factual error. You can only see *the data that's provided*, which may be anything between a short description and several hundred K of data. Effectively, since the feeds available from news pages are short on data, seeing only the headline and a brief discussion is how it stands today, but saying "With RSS" implies a limit imposed by the underlying technology, and that's just not true.
      • Apologies. Bad writing on my part.

        What I meant to say was the source could control how much or less of the news they were willing to show to attract attention.

        It's bit like the length of the skirt issue.

  • So...proprietary RSS? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by EchoMirage ( 29419 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:58PM (#12188383)
    What the article doesn't make clear is whether or not this means that any of these three publications will make plain-vanilla RSS readily available. If they will, they'll have a hard time convincing people to use their own branded software. If not (e.g. if their RSS feeds are somewhat proprietary), they're shooting themselves in the foot. RSS is an established, working standard. The main complaint of many content providers over RSS is that it's not quite as ad-friendly as regular HTML content (this is a feature, not a bug, if you're a reader).

    The Denver Post hasn't had an RSS feed all this time; if they finally post one, I might start reading them more regularly. If, on the other hand, I have to use their proprietary software for their proprietary RSS feed (which almost certainly will be a Windows 2K/XP only application), they'll see my readership decline 100%.

    Better idea for content providers: give your readers Firefox [getfirefox.com] and Sage [mozdev.org] to read your feeds. You'll be giving them a great RSS feeder and be doing them a favor by also providing them with a secure, standards-compliant web browser.
    • Sage is the way to go. All you have to do is find the rss link and then just right-click and select bookmark this link. Then have your own special folder and your done. Sage is the bomb!
    • I'd only add to that, for the article's "non-early adopters", include Feedview [epigoon.com].
    • If not (e.g. if their RSS feeds are somewhat proprietary), they're shooting themselves in the foot. RSS is an established, working standard. The main complaint of many content providers over RSS is that it's not quite as ad-friendly as regular HTML content (this is a feature, not a bug, if you're a reader).

      This was my first thought after reading about the LA Times plans in the article.

      I have to use their proprietary software for their proprietary RSS feed (which almost certainly will be a Windows 2K
    • The grauniad at least already offers vanilla rss feeds for its website.
  • I would much rather see the option to control your own news sources on yahoo and google. One of my alerts is for "google" so you can imagine how many articles a day I get sent. It would be nice to only get feeds from say the top 10 newspapers.

  • Horray... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Soon, there will be no content.

    Only aggregators; and aggregators of aggregators.
    • The next big wave, I think, will be once having abolished content by replacing it with aggregators, we begin to move from there into the creation of content through the aggregation of aggregators.

      As an anology, this can work in the same way that lambda-calculus and set theory may be used to provide a basis for the integers. We may define the null aggregator, which contains no sites, as "one" and an aggregator which aggregates the "one" aggregator as "successor to one". From this point we are in a position

  • :scratches head: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The reason I read news.google.com is because I don't want the bias of a single media source picking and choosing the sorts of things I look at.

    So why would I want to look at a service like google news, but... run by a single media source?

    If I trusted The Guardian to be consistently able to identify and produce the stories worth reading, I'd... read The Guardian.

    Anyway two other things.
    1. MSN already does this. Their news aggregator is basically a "and here's some other stories" link for MSN news. But I gue

  • The Guardian (Score:5, Informative)

    by lxt ( 724570 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @03:02PM (#12188397) Journal
    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.

  • Legal Implications? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bling..bling ( 603514 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @03:04PM (#12188409) Homepage
    Will they run into any legal troubles, etc.? I thought one of the reasons Google News is still 'beta' is because they can't figure a way to make money on it, without getting all the content providers (news sources) up in arms... Couldn't these new offerings anger the other news sources, and start up a war between provider and crawlers, etc? Don't know the answer...

  • Nothing new in Poland (Score:4, Informative)

    by j_hirny ( 305473 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @03:12PM (#12188456) Homepage
    Polish biggest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza [gazeta.pl], has been offering its own RSS aggregator [gazeta.pl] for a few months. And they've been marketising it outside the Internet, which surprised me -- I've seen ads placed on city buses, for example.

  • Short Attention Span (Score:3, Funny)

    by shreevatsa ( 845645 ) <shreevatsa.slash ... m minus caffeine> on Saturday April 09, 2005 @03:13PM (#12188459)
    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?
    Seriously, can't you just look at the three sentences that you've written before this one and see that you haven't? Why ask rhetorical questions?

  • Actualy, a good idea... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pathway ( 2111 ) <pathway@google.com> on Saturday April 09, 2005 @03:19PM (#12188492)
    Yeah, you read right... it's a good idea, from the Newspaper's point of view.

    Why not have an eMagazine (which is basicaly what this is) instead of a webpage? Why not have a reader that can provide _just their content_ and not the compititions, plus allow them to provide special ads and multimedia content?

    From the point of view of the newspapers, this is the best idea to come from the internet... and they were inspired by the sucess of RSS.

    Now, what can those of us, like most slashdot readers, do about formats that are _closing_ such as this? Compete. That's all we're allowed to do.

    Come to think of it, there is one other problem with this idea: Unlike the web, you can't go from newspage to newspage to get diffrent points of view... Which is one of the reasons I enjoy reading news on the Web.

    So, when the "New York Times Online" reader comes out, I'm sure it'll be popular with those who read the NYT. I'm also sure it'll be an initial success... We'll see where it goes from there.
    • An eMagazine implies having a fixed multipage document such as a PDF file. That's the beauty of RSS - a well formed and standard file that can contain header info (title, category...) and optionally actual content. Then with a smart client you subscribe to multiple feeds and mix and match what you want. Decent providers such as the BBC provide different RSS feeds for different topics too, such as tech, space, money, whatever. If you want you can go an extra mile and filter out within feeds on the client si

  • But! (Score:1, Redundant)

    by cluening ( 6626 )
    But I already have my own news aggregator!

    http://www.wirelesscouch.net/cgi-bin/headlines/hea dlines.pl [wirelesscouch.net]
  • Really, it [brownsite.net] does.

    Is that easy enough?

    I wonder why google doesn't have an rss service like yahoo [yahoo.com] does?

    Before I got yahoo's feeds I searched high and low for google's - but as far as I can tell the only way to get it is by various screen scraper [justinpfister.com] type progies.. A shame, really.

  • It's called "Wire Service Headlines" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @03:58PM (#12188684) Homepage Journal
    Most newspapers have a "World and National Headlines" section, with wire service reports. Some also have wire service sections like "Weird news" and such.

    How is this any different than what they propose?

    My beef with newspapers isn't lack of aggregate content but rather having to log in every time. Just let me load the web page or look at my live bookmarks without having to enter a stupid password or give them personal data and I'll be quite happy.
    • How is this any different than what they propose?

      If I properly understand what they propose, it promotes transparency in the media. To pick just one controversial topic in the news, when there is Israeli-Palestinian violence, I read about it from Reuters, Xinhua, CNN, Fox, and Al-Jazeera. Certain facts will be the same in all their stories. Certain phrases will be cleverly swapped depending on the source.

      The end result is that I get a far more objective look at what happened and I have a much better i

  • 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?

    Advertising, advertising, let me think -- that had something to do with not having Firefox and the Adblock extention, didn't it...I dimly remember advertising...oh, those were the days, when Saddam was still in power, Hellboy was only a comic and BSD was still alive...sigh...to be young and foolish again...

  • The newspapers that I can commonly find in my area are already simply aggregates of wired news service reports -- with occasionally an extra sidebar written by some hapless freelancer.
  • What's so hard about making RSS or Atom feeds available? Google News is just repackaging other peoples headlines, the outlets might as well let readers have a choice on how they want to view the content.
  • over 1,400 executives of companies with annual revenue around $250 to $500 million

    Is that executives's pay or companies income?

  • Issues (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Cliff.Braun ( 825786 )
    Won't this bring up some of the issues that Google avoids by not advertising on the service, and not actually being in the news business. That French place didn't really have a good complaint because google was just linking to other stories in the same vein, without any ads at all or trying to promote their own stories. Won't another news paper getting stories from other sites from pages with their brands and advertising open them to lawsuits? The other negative consequences for a news agency is that it wil
  • The thing I really like about news.google.com is that you can get a variety of perspectives on a story. You can also quickly tell which stories are "canned press releases" and which are originals.

    I can't imagine a corporate media company wanting you to see that. Surely they would only aggregate unique stories, or ones that agree nicely with their own spin on events. (with the possible exception of contradictary stories to their own that have no credibility)

    An effective news aggregator, by definition, s
    • I have always browsed news.google.com for the latest news around the world and am very impressed by the various perspectives that it threw at the reader. Infact, It is like reading 100s of newspaper sources at the same time. I think google is doing a great job in the news front.
      It is only logical that others are also trying to jump into the news agregation bandwagon because obviously they also want to have a finger (or the whole hand maybe) in the pie and reap the rewards.

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