An e-mail came in this morning from one of my RSS subscribers.
Hi Tom,
I’ve been subscribed to your “Prints the chaff” RSS feed for a couple of weeks, and enjoy your thoughts. I was particularly interested in your recent entry called “Talking News.” In it, you said that people will often read news and features about something they’ve already experienced, in order to gain validation.
You also refered to that as “context” and I’d like to comment on that. I have a pet theory that goes something like this: online news sites offer, among other things, news articles – stories about news-worthy events. Unfortunately, viewers tend to consider news stories interchangeable – if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all. Lists of news articles (and the articles themselves) are treated more or less as commodities.
The second part of my pet theory is that, one way (perhaps the best way) to get around the unpleasant implications of this commoditization, is to provide not just a reporting of news events, but also provide news “context.” In this case, what I mean by context is a convenient way for viewers to move from a news story to a “special report” that contains loads of background material that’s highly relevant to the specific story.
My idea (on which your comments are welcome and solicited) is that a news site that can augment their news feeds with relevant “context” (in the sense I just described above) has the opportunity to move away from commoditization and toward a more unique, valued (by viewers) news offering.
Does that make any sense to you?
Best regards,
Terry Steichen
Terry: I think if a newspaper were hardcore about getting people to buy the print newspaper and patient enough to build a paying audience, they’d say “subscribe to the Journal for the rest of the story… half-price subscriptions for Web users!” This will frustrate people if they’re forced to buy the dead-tree edition, but I think you’ve struck upon a way to generate interest in paid online content: use the live news feed as a gateway to a subscription to the online version of the newspaper. With a few clicks, paid subscribers have the context (assuming the paper’s reporters are covering the big picture). As for the rest of the context that comes from external links, regular users of the feed are apt to supply it, in much the same way bloggers’ comments add interesting details and corrections.
As long as I’m on the subject, Bill Dennis responded to Saturday’s post about bringing blogging to newspapers:
Blogging produces a different type of journalism. It?s immediate. It?s personal. It?s top up and not bottom down. It?s fact checked by its own readers. It?s public journalism. It?s not compatible with what mainstream newspapers are all about. Newspapers can mimic the conventions of blogging, but most will not adopt real blogging because it requires relinquishing editorial control over the process. Newspapers want control over every single word that appears in their pages. That?s why so many newspaper people have their own sometimes anonymous blogs.
The day I know a newspaper is sponsoring a real blog is when I see one call an elected official an ?asshat.?
Bill’s the webmaster of a local-news blog that offers a peek at how newspaper blogging could work.
I was researching newspaper-hosted blogging over the weekend and found out that NJ.com, where frequent Testy Copy Editors contributor Dean Betz runs the Web site, has launched an interesting experiment. It has a bunch of volunteer bloggers; most are blogging local sports, but some are blogging local news. Take a look and see what you think.