RSS feeds going mainstream : Time for journalism industry to wake up
Speaking at ILTA – International Legal Technology Association – this month I asked an audience of about 150 how many use RSS feeds and a newsreader. It was over half. If I had asked that question two years ago, I’ll bet my house it would have been less than 10 people.
Not surprising that media consultant Amy Gahran writes that RSS feeds are going pretty mainstream.
Basically, the trend is that more people are more interested in getting the content they want delivered to them wherever they prefer to be, rather than having to make a special ‘trip’ online to someone’s site. And they’re using lots of popular tools to do just that.
Amy goes on to discuss the importance of journalists and news organizations understand RSS feeds.
…I’m seeing news organizations crumble because they aren’t adapting their business models fast enough to the changing media landscape. Good reporters are getting laid off, and important news is going unreported, in part because news organizations are clinging to ineffective strategies like banner ads and partial-text feeds — which depend on people coming to your site in order for you to make money — rather than finding ways (like feed advertising and improving search visibility through full-text feeds) to make money in a more distributed, customized media environment.
Business basics, folks: You’ve gotta go where your customers and community are.
Amy understands the role journalism plays in an informed society and is rightfully ticked off that the industry’s RSS ignorance places it in jeopardy.
Without good journalism, it’s hard to get the information we need to make decisions on our own behalf. It’s hard to judge where the collective good really lies. But journalism (at least on the scale and consistency that our large, complex society requires) needs a supporting business structure. That doesn’t mean that huge news organizations must survive or we’re all doomed. But it does mean that (regardless of news org size) the business model supporting journalism must be realistic and viable in the current environment.
That’s why I’m so concerned about ignorance about feeds, and persistent loyalty to boneheaded online-media business strategies, especially among media professionals.
And she’s spot on that clinging to a business models requiring partial text RSS feeds (excerpt only) to support banner ads on web pages doesn’t work in the long run. The journalism industry needs to work with Google’s FeedBurner to develop improved ad models with full text RSS feeds. Defying ease of use for the public which is now consuming RSS feeds in mass is a dead end.