The Wardman Wire

There’s an annoying, and in my opinion rather uninformed, post over at the Online Journalism Blog, “Newspapers, turn off your RSS feeds“, where Malcolm Coles argues from Google Reader figures that newspapers should withdraw their reader-level RSS feeds and use them as an information provider for external service providers, switching their readers to Twitter.

I’ll address of few of his points. My responses are indented.

1 – 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.

The subscriber figures are “low” (if you ignore the fact that Google reader is not the entire RSS-reader world), but that of course tells us nothing whatsover about all the other uses of RSS.

2 – I suggest newspapers switch to Twitter instead.

Apples and oranges.

Wheat vs chaff As a reader, you can see which stories other people are RTing and are therefore popular.

Apples and oranges. As a reader, using RSS does not prevent me using Twitter as well.

Context There’s space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline (well, there is for those that don’t just stick the first few words of the standfirst after the headline).

Actually by the time it’s been RT’d just 3 times it is closer to 100 chars, and the description will be edited or chopped by Retweeters. In an RSS feed I can have the entire newspaper article if I wish.

Promotion Followers can RT newspaper stories, promoting the paper – they can’t do this with elements of an RSS feed.

This is just wrong. This is already a basic feature of the most poular “Tweet this post” Wordpress plugin. Just how long do you think it will take to develop such an option for a newspaper if they decide they need it?

Tracking Stories’ development can be tracked on Twitter – you can’t usually tell what’s changed in an RSS feed.

Apples and oranges. And just how is that undermined by people using RSS?

Conversation You can take part in a conversation on Twitter. People only talk to their RSS feed when they swear at it. The journalists behind the story can tweet, too.

Apples and oranges. And just how is that undermined by people using RSS?

3 – Martin raises a whole series of points about design and how RSS feeds can be hard to find on newspaper sites, how feeds can be full of gibberish and so on. None of these are points against RSS; they are points against bad website design, and bad website maintenance.

Why RSS is a Good Thing

I’m not going to spend time mounting a really detailed defence – it isn’t necessary since I think this is a self-collapsing argument in a futile debate. But let me summarise 10 quick points:

1 – What about podcast subscription? They are driven by RSS.

2 – I see no downside of running RSS – certainly the overhead is absolutely minimal. So why remove it?

3 – You can ask a design question about how you draw attention to RSS feeds, but that is not about “RSS or not”; it is about needing a competent web and management team.

4 – I just don’t buy your idea that the poor ‘ickle public can’t cope with a lot of content.

5 – Guess what most papers drive their Twitter headline feeds from? e.g., http://twitter.com/guardiantech

The same applies to sidebar widgets, and dozens of other varieties of content service, including a good number of mobile feeds. For example, the CNN News widget runs on almost 15,000 other websites. How much traffic do you think that drives? It is all based on RSS.

6 – Arguing to replace an open standard with a proprietary service is apples and oranges, and not very smart. We might as well say “let’s replace our plumbing with British Gas”.

7 – I think this is a debate alongside bloggers vs journalists or cars vs bicycles. We need both.

8 – If newspapers want to turn off their feeds as part of a “circling the wagons” strategy to try and guard their revenue model than they are simply taking a blind leap 10 years backwards and will vanish down a deeper black hole than the one they are already in. In one way, as a news and politics blogger, I’d be delighted if some of the competition went away. If they must restrict the content, then let them move to Excerpt or Headline feeds.

9 – One point you haven’t addressed – RSS is archiveable, and I can read it offline if I use a suitable reader.

10 – The idea of applying more control, implied if you restrict easy to access RSS feeds, negates an entire culture of open development. If RSS feeds were not there to be found for every website, just how many innovative services would be developed.

Wrapping Up

A response from the Online Journalism village: Journalism.co.uk.