JMSC

Hong Kong’s own South China Morning Post stands out from this group as it doesn’t provide a feed option. This newspaper appears to value the traditional business model over access, as all content is subscription-only; even then subscribers need to pay a fee to look up archive articles.

The New York Times wins for the most flashy feeds page, inundating the e-reader with 104 different options! The web team their certainly support the e-reader’s inclination to organise and individualise content.

I personally think the BBC News website is outstanding - it is as much an educational tool as a new station because of all the information options available. When it comes to relying upon RSS feeds, clearly you are more limited, though the one-liners leads push you to click back to the website anyway to read the story you’re interested in. From there you can follow the links to areas of interest. The International News feeds page offers 30-odd feed choices, but you can find variations as the BBC has 33 different language versions including BBC China. Most provide more limited feed selections, but watch out for upgrades in the future if you speak Ukrainian etc.

The HK Standard’s offering is limited to one feed option which gives you complete access to all the headlines for the daily edition. It’s actually an expedient way of keeping up with local news without navigating a website, and certainly easier than popping out to get the paper, and then thumbing through inky pages.

RSS feeds also clear the clutter of graphics and advertising on the webpage – this has its drawbacks though. Obviously if you are an advertiser with the publication, the last thing you’d want is for readers to bypass your carefully crafted and costly ads. It is possible for a reader to rarely visit the original news site, and thus all elements of branding and image become redundant in the cyber world’s quest the manage content.

However, the feeds only provide a summary glance at the day’s events, so you will have to click to enter the website anyway, though you mitigate the extra time clicking through pages till you find what you want.

Quite how the feeds tool will alter journalists’ way of doing things is hard to predict, though they might want to craft more catchy titles and leads to merit a click over the rest. This will be essential to maintain credibility with advertisers and sustain profits as e-readers migrate to aggregation engines.

As to whether the hard or soft copy will win out in the end, I believe it depends on individual needs and perspectives. There is something rather satisfying about picking up a broadsheet and thumbing, or fumbling, through the pages cover to cover. For photojournalists, this is their primary medium of expression, where you can be drawn to a story on the strength of the image alongside. In our pursuit of more and more information from more and more channels, news feeds have, for the time being, revolutionised the way we ‘suck’ in content.

I agree with J.D. Lasica that RSS technology will continue to evolve to better meet the reader’s needs. However, “After a couple of hours of subscribing to favorite feeds, your news grazing habits will be changed forever” is still questionable for me. Yes, it is a great tool to manage content from different pages, but I still like to click onto the IHT and SCMP websites first thing in the morning. Perhaps this loyalty will disappear in future, but only if My Yahoo and Google Reader truly do save precious time, rather than adding to the increasing deluge of information and thus multitasking that that is becoming synonymous with 21^st century modern living.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 3:03 am and is filed under Assignment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.