Most major newspaper sites not leveraging RSS well
Posted by Bill Gaffney | October 1st, 2007RSS is an invaluable tool in bringing people content from a litany of sources (blogs, todos, searches, stocks) and its adoption is growing. Most decent email applications and custom homepages allow for RSS feed integration. Nearly every site prominently features the trusted orange icon, but how many actually do RSS well?
To get this blog rolling, I’d like to start with a recent study released by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) regarding the utilization and effectiveness of major news sites use of RSS. Which answers the question with a fairly resounding “not well.”
What the newspaper industry appears to fail to comprehend is the idea that the notion of being a newspaper is a dead-end road. Now before I get inundated with criticism, hear me out. Newspapers are not dead. The model is changing, and qualifying yourself as a newspaper is simply short-sighted and does not capitalize on the potential of your staff. The correct business label should be news syndication.
Newspapers should be capitalizing on every available resource to have their particular voice heard be that in newsprint, radio, television, email, RSS, podcasts, etc. They, for the most part, have simply kept the blinders on and reworked the old mentality from newspaper to website.
There are several sites that have excelled. The Christian Science Monitor is a site that I have always thought highly of, and appears to have impressed the ICMPA as well netting the second spot for best usage. But even here, fundamental flaws are outlined. Specific issues are that only staff written stories are included in the feeds; multimedia is not included; and, most significantly, the content provided is severely handicapped benefiting solely those scanning headlines.
The worst of the top 20 was the Newsweek, where despite the integration into MSNBC, timeliness and reliability were the main criticisms by the center.
Both the website and the RSS feed searches returned archived stories—many were from weeks and even years prior to the search. Also in both cases the searches returned results not in chronological order, so it was hard to determine what was timely. [more]
For those of us outside the top twenty sites represented in the study, this should serve as a wake-up call to push for change within our own companies and within the industry.
