Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog

Friday, September 15, 2006

Up three rivers of news without a paddle?

When I told RockyTopBrigadier Johnny Dobbins that his PDA-compatible blog aggregator looked like a Tennessee River of News, he took the idea literally and registered the name. It didn't take me many visits (and typos) to suggest shortening it to TNron.com. (Having a name that rhymes with a certain defunct energy company may make it more memorable.)

I also asked whether the Django aggregator toolkit feedjack could be used to flow together rivers of Tennessee bloggers and professional news sites... more of the "Pro/Am" citizen journalism idea I keep mentioning... Johnny (rapidly becoming "dJohnny") gave a combined-sources "pro" aggregator a try, so now http://rockytopbrigade.org/mobile/ is the "Am" part and http://tnron.com is for "Pro" prose.

Background: The "river of news" nickname for last-in-first-out aggregators comes from Dave Winer, who recently put together text-only rivers of stories from the New York Times, CNet and BBC newsfeeds. As I mentioned last month's Dave's extra trick is that he links the rivers' summaries to the "Printable" versions of the stories -- text-only versions that wrap nicely into the reading space of his Blackberry or my Palm TX.

Inspiration: But I still do most of my news reading on a 15-inch laptop screen. That, and last month's nostalgia about reading parallel columns of news with Atex, inspired me to open three browser windows side-by-side to look at the Tennessee, Times and BBC rivers... which got me thinking about the controversial old Web technology called "frames"... So I put a Three Rivers of News page together to demonstrate to my class.

Controversy: On that page I included a discussion of just why frames were controversial. If you try the page, notice that the Times uses a technological solution to people "appropriating" stories by using frames: My page frames Dave's copy of the Times headline and summary feed, but if you click on a headline link, the story itself breaks out of the frame. Not only that, it bypasses the text-only version Dave linked to, and loads the original story -- complete with advertising, Times logos, and section menus.

Thoughts:

Frame-busting seems like a much better solution than sending a lawyer to my office...
By sending "my" readers to the original story, the Times is exposing them to the ads and offers that pay the salaries of its reporters and editors, which is certainly a good thing... Some of my students want to draw New York Times paychecks someday.
Questions: What about the readers following those other "rivers" to the text-only stories?

How can they contribute to the good work the reporters are doing?
Are they just scanning headlines, or are they comfortable reading full stories on a small screen?
Will they go to the full ad-supported site when they get to the office?
Would they tolerate having text ads in the text-only stories?
Would they pay for a subscription to NYTimesriver.com? (Pay the Times, that is... not Dave. But let the Times pay Dave for recognizing that sometimes less is more... more of what I want than the Times own mobile feed, for instance)
Would they prefer special versions of the stories--shorter than the originals, but longer than the usual RSS summaries? (More "rewrite desk" jobs for journalism grads, if there's money to pay them?)

News: Speaking of The New York Times, I've just bookmarked a neat blog page where its Web folks point out their latest ideas: http://firstlook.nytimes.com

Then while browsing around the site, I also stumbled on this intriguing address for a small-screen-size "site map," complete with some free archives going back to 1981: http://spiderbites.nytimes.com

The bare bones look of those pages makes me think I've slipped into something through the back door! Hmm. I don't remember browsing the Web when this was news. I guess the spiderbites pages are individual stories referred to by the Times Topics pages introduced earlier this year. Something similar also appears to be a feature of other Times-owned sites... see http://spiderbites.boston.com

Bottom line: Back to my main train of thought... If cool little text-only River of News aggregators are going to strip out both the advertising and the links to advertising-bearing pages at http://nytimes.com, how do readers of those "rivers" help pay the salaries of the reporters, writers, editors and publishers who make it all possible?

Comments appreciated.

7:49:14 PM