Pay For News? No Thanks. I’ll Make My Own.

banging on about advertising, marketing and social media

Pay For News? No Thanks. I’ll Make My Own.

12 August 2009 2 Comments

I’ve been wanting to comment on Rupert’s plan to start charging for his online news comment (I’ve purposefully linked to a News Ltd site here – good chance you won’t be able to get to it in the near future). But there’s been plenty of smart folk doubting the viability of the move to a paid format and I agree with most of them. So I won’t rehash.

However, it was a new experience I had this week which assured me that we’re going to be OK without Mr Murdoch and his virtual paperboy. It was on the new RSS feed publisher Feedly. Feedly is an RSS publisher which hooks into your Google (or other) RSS feeds and publishes them on a very attractive customised page. There’s also some very nice features such as increased ease to like and share content. However, for me, the biggest attraction was that it took the chore out of trolling through RSS feeds (I like you all but you write so much) to a more leisurely browse of content. It’s not a new concept, just a concept executed very well. Here’s a screen shot of my feeds…

feedly | cover_1250050898033

As we see platforms such as these developed we’re not going to rely on news site to aggregate what we want to read. We’ll still be able to get breaking news from the ABC (nice post by Ben Shepherd here). But better still we can choose the extra add-ons of news which are of particular interest to us. For me, that includes industry news from Mumbrella, sport in the form of the World Game, celebrity junk from What Would Tyler Durden Do, technology from Lifehacker and music news from Rave Magazine. And that’s only a start. There are over 300 RSS sources in my feed which will contribute to my own customisable online news site. Add in feeds from friends in my social networks and I have a pretty good snapshot of what is happening within one page.

Granted that RSS feeds are only used by the early majority, it is not a mainstream solution. However, it is an online newspaper I would pay for. Luckily, I don’t have to.

2 Comments »

Mandi said:

I heart Feedly and it’s only been a few days … it’s only just begun.

If anyone has compiled a list of various aggregators I’d love to know about it.

# 12 August 2009 at 2:38 pm

Nathan Bush (author) said:

@ Mandi Would be interesting to see. I was using iGoogle to aggregate a heap of my info but found a heap of the add ons were unreliable. This is a good homepage to open up to.

# 13 August 2009 at 10:38 pm