March 8, 2005

Branded RSS readers not the way

Poyn­ter has yet another tidbit, about yet another media outlet cre­at­ing a branded RSS reader.

This is a hor­ri­ble idea. H o r r i b l e.

Why?

  1. Trust — Whether you’re devel­op­ing your own, or licens­ing a reader from some­one else, you’re pre­sent­ing it as coming from the site.

    We live in a day and age where the line between a healthy machine and one that gets “pwnded” comes down to trust. Can you trust the soft­ware run­ning on your machine.

    Simply put, why should I trust soft­ware writ­ten by a news­pa­per? Shouldn’t they stick to writ­ing head­lines and stories?

  2. Con­fu­sion — An explo­sion of branded RSS read­ers is likely to bring with it a vari­ety of new terms, UI par­a­digms, and “marketing-speak”.

    This will all be done in attempt to “make RSS easier” for “our users” to “understand.”

    In fact, what it will do, is frac­ture the mind­share of the gen­eral news con­sum­ing audience.

    Imag­ine two friends, Bob, who reads a national paper, and Mary, who reads her local paper. Bob uses his paper’s branded RSS reader. Bob runs into Mary at the park and tells his friend about this cool thing on his newspaper’s site, called Syndi-​news. Mary thinks that “having the news e-filed directly to her Syndi-​news site”, as Bob described it, would be cool.

    Mary goes home and starts look­ing for a Syndi-​news link on her local paper’s site. But her local paper, doesn’t have Syndi-​news that’s e-filed, it has Accuquick Head­lines. So Mary is left out of the good­ness that is RSS/Atom.

  3. Con­trol freaks — I think what ulti­mately drives the move to create branded RSS read­ers is a mis­guided attempt to main­tain con­trol over the ‘reading experience.’

    I have news for the news indus­try, you lost it the minute you posted con­tent in a dig­i­tal format. While analog mate­r­ial can be altered, dig­i­tal con­tent is even easier, and thus, more likely to be refor­mated, changed, etc. to suit what the read­ers want/need.

    I know it’s a dif­fi­cult tran­si­tion to go from having con­trol over the con­tent, its pre­sen­ta­tion and its pro­mo­tion to having con­trol over only the con­tent, but that’s the way the Inter­net is. I’m sorry, I didn’t invent it, that’s just the way it is.

The double-​edged sword of the Inter­net is that con­tent is king, yet it is also a commodity.

So, my advice is, embrace your role on the Inter­net. Be a con­tent provider. Be a great con­tent provider. Do good jour­nal­ism, let your users read it, search it, index it, share it, slice it, dice it, and make juli­enne fries out of it.

Your read­ers will thank you for it.

Filed under: Business, Journalism, Web design

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