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Paul Bradshaw
RSS feeds, advertising and selling attention

March 9th, 2010 by Paul Bradshaw

Media organisations who only offer partial RSS feeds might be interested to look at a couple of posts from 2 websites with different experiences of monetising their feeds. First, Jason Snell of MacWorld:

“RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS, sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the return as ads on web pages.”

Then, John Gruber of Daring Fireball (cached here if you find it as slow as I do):

“The ads in most sponsored RSS feeds are indeed cheap and lousy. The ads in DF’s [Daring Fireball's] RSS feed are neither. They’re priced at a premium, and have attracted (if I do say so myself) premium sponsors.

“If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.”

Snell’s response: “What works for [Gruber's one-man] kind of site doesn’t necessarily work for our kind.”

It’s also worth noting the tertiary benefits of full RSS feeds. Offering full RSS feeds makes it more likely a developer is going to create something useful out of it (expensive development time for free), bringing more readers and attention to your advertising or, in the case of the BBC (which may have licensing issues holding it back), fulfilling its public service remit.

Do you or your organisation do anything interesting with your RSS feeds? Are they full or partial? I’d love to know.

(Note, OJB uses the <more> tag to to ensure the homepage isn’t dominated by a single post. Unfortunately, this results in partial RSS feeds. Some day I’ll sort this.)

Paul Bradshaw
What do your RSS feeds say about you?

February 23rd, 2010 by Paul Bradshaw

Ben Harrow, a student in my undergraduate online journalism classes, has written a blog post about the environmental news RSS feeds of some of the national newspapers.

It appears that the Telegraph ‘recycling’ RSS feed hasn’t been updated in 3 months (even during the Copenhagen talks), while

“The Daily Mail has upwards of 30 RSS feeds, each updating you on a celebrity of your choice. But no environment feed. Nothing.”

So what does a newspaper’s RSS feeds say about its priorities? Any other examples?

Paul Bradshaw
This year’s reading list – an OPML file

October 29th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw

In addition to the usual reading list I give to students on the new MA Online Journalism, I also provide an OPML file of around 50 RSS feeds they should be subscribing to – broadly, 5 feeds each in 10 categories.

I thought I should make it available here, so: here it is.

The idea is that a) they get instant access to up-to-date news and analysis of a range of relevant areas; and b) it introduces them to the concept of RSS, if they don’t already know about it, and how to share OPML files.

It seems a no-brainer that we should be doing this on all courses.

Oh, and if you think there are better feeds, let me know.

Paul Bradshaw
Collate dozens of RSS feeds from one page (Something For The Weekend #16)

July 10th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw

Here’s a very useful tool if you come across an article that gives you a whole bunch of RSS feeds you’d like to subscribe to – or, indeed, if you’re writing such a post yourself.
[Read more]

Paul Bradshaw
Best RSS feeds for information graphics – in one lovely OPML file

July 6th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw

There’s a great list of RSS feeds for infographics news over at Nicholas Rapp’s blog, which I’ve belatedly discovered. It’s thoroughly recommended – but copying and pasting them all into your reader is a bit of a chore – so I’ve created an OPML file of them all which you can import in one graceful motion.

Here’s the OPML file

And here’s how you get those feeds into Google Reader (the process should be pretty similar in other RSS readers): [Read more]

malcolmcoles
Newspapers: turn off your RSS feeds

July 1st, 2009 by malcolmcoles

Update, 2 days later: Paul is kind enough to let me guest post here (ie I wrote this, not him). It was going well until this post … You can read my climbdown here

The latest subscriber figures (see table below, and first published in my blog’s newspapers category) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it’s time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds – and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.

(You can read some of the defences of RSS here and here)

The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.

And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.

melanie-phillips-rssDaily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there’s hope for the UK population yet …).

Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.

The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK … [Read more]

Paul Bradshaw
Letter to Govt. pt3: Should councils publish newspapers? A response to the Media Committee

April 30th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw

As part of a group response to  the government’s inquiry into the future of local and regional media, Paul Bradshaw looks at the role of local authorities in regional journalism. Blog comments will be submitted to the inquiry as well as the blog posts.

So. The Committee for Culture, Media and Sport want responses on “The appropriateness and effectiveness of print and electronic publishing initiatives undertaken directly by public sector bodies at the local level”

The question of what public sector bodies should be allowed to publish, how that affects local journalism, the local economy, and local democracy, is one of the most difficult to resolve – not least because it involves so many interconnected elements.

The first problem is that any discussion runs the risk of conflating a number of separate but interlinked elements:

  • local councils and local democracy are not the same thing; 
  • local newspapers and local journalism are also two different things.

Whatever model emerges must recognise that papers are not the only places where public discussion takes place, and print journalists are not the only people holding power to account.

[Read more]

Paul Bradshaw
3 weeks in: launching a Midlands environmental news site

March 19th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw

3 weeks ago my class of online journalism students were introduced to the website they were going to be working on: BirminghamRecycled.co.uk – environmental news for Birmingham and the West Midlands.

The site has been built by final year journalism degree student Kasper Sorensen, who studied the online journalism module last year.

In building and running the service Kasper has done a number of clever, networked things I thought I should highlight. They include:

  • Creating a Delicious network for the site – every journalist in the team has a Delicious account; this gathers together all of the useful webpages that journalists are bookmarking
  • Tweetgrid of all journalists’ tweets - again, every journalist has a Twitter account. This pulls them all together.
  • Twitter account @bhamrecycled
  • Kasper sent the whole team an OPML file of subscriptions to RSS feeds of searches for every Midlands area and environmentally related keywords. In other words, journalists could import this into their Google Reader and at a stroke be monitoring any mention of certain key words (e.g. ‘pollution’, ‘recycling’) in Birmingham areas.
  • He also shared a Google calendar of relevant events

The site itself is clever too.

  • The About page has a list of all contributing journalists with individual RSS feeds.
  • In addition, each author has a link to their own profile page which not only displays their articles but pulls Twitter tweets, Delicious bookmarks and blog posts.

Kasper wanted to explicitly follow a Mashable-style model rather than a traditional news service: he felt an overly formal appearance would undermine his attempts to build a community around the site.

And community is key. When unveiling the site to the journalists Kasper made the following presentation – a wonderful distillation of how journalists need to approach news in a networked world:

Paul Bradshaw
Guardian joins New York Times in releasing open API

March 10th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw

Will 2009 be the year news organisations finally went open? Barely a month after the New York Times allowed users to build on 28 years of content with its articles API (with immediate results), The Guardian is opening up over a million articles to developers for free as part of its own ‘Open Platform‘. [Read more]

Paul Bradshaw
Online journalism lesson 1: Using RSS and social media for newsgathering

February 10th, 2009 by Paul Bradshaw

This year I’m aiming to blog all of my course materials for online journalism. Yesterday was the first class, so below is the PowerPoint for what I call Passive-Aggressive Newsgathering: using RSS and social media for newsgathering.

Note: the Online Journalism module is aimed at second year undergraduates on the degree in journalism I teach on.

Next,