Next generation newspapers?
Most Sunday’s I indulge myself by taking a couple hours to read the newspapers. Yet I find the sheer amount of waste they create extremely frustrating.
If I were to cut out all of the articles and adverts that I read and found interesting, and placed them in a pile, I’m sure that pile would be much smaller than the pile of paper ready for the recycling bin. The sports supplement exemplifies this perfectly; I have no interest in sport so this huge wad of paper goes straight in the bin. What an utter waste!
Surely there must be some way for newspapers to provide a more tailored news service that gives their audience exactly what they want. Like an iPlayer for news.
RSS feeds go some way in providing people with a way of subscribing to the types of news they are interested in, but I think newspapers could go further in providing a customised service.
Newspapers could provide a totally tailored news service by employing RSS feeds to offer subscribers a wider range of choice. For example rather than being able to subscribe to news about sport you could subscribe to articles purely about badminton.
Using keywords to tag articles could allow users to subscribe to news about particular people, companies, countries or whatever. This could all then be fed into a single personalised and customisable RSS feed that the user can subscribe to and read on their smartphone, PDA or computer. Or they could pump all of this news into a Guardian24 style PDF that the user could read on their eBook reader or even print out.
I imagine this could be funded with advertising or a subscribtion service, but whether users would be willing to subscribe I’m not sure. Would you rather pay to subscribe to a personalised RSS feed or put up with advertising?
Telegraph does already offer huge range of RSS feeds for sport – including badminton. Check out http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rssfeeds/ for the full list from Accrington Stanley to Women’s Golf and more.
What would be interesting would be if a newsagent (as in corner shop type outlet) let you mix and match your supplements. Observer Music mag, Sunday Times magazine, Telegraph motoring.
This reminds me a lot of a post I saw a few weeks ago: http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2009/01/meet-the-new-schtick-2.html seems like Russell’s thinking similar things, sort of.
I agree with Matthew, it’s crazy that outlets even as huge as the BBC have only 7 industry categories of feeds like Business, Health and Technology! Why not drill down to Banking and Insurance, Oncology and Cardiology, Software and Gaming? If we (PR Newswire) as news distributors are able to provide 250 categories for Journalists, Bloggers and enthusiasts, why can’t they??