Friday, April 01, 2005

Trends in online news

Mark Glaser at OJR writes about Yahoo News and trends in online news. Some excerpts:
    One way to build on the time spent on the site is to make the story pages more rich with links to relevant content on other pages

    "People don't start from the front page, they often start at story pages," [Former WSJ Online editor Neil] Budde said. "So if this is the first point of entry into our site, what can we do to expose people there to more of what we have available? I think it's important for any news site."

    [Yahoo Director of Personalization] Scott Gatz ... [argues] the key to success for winning over the masses was not bothering to even call them "RSS feeds".

    "If you look at how we've integrated RSS into Yahoo News, we're not actually using those three letters very much," Gatz said. "So you look at it, and it says what would you like to add to your political news? Here are some political blogs. Would you like to add CNN or MSNBC onto your news page? The fact that it happens in XML or RSS isn't the important thing. Most of the users don't want to have to figure that out."
See also "Targeting and online newspapers", "XML is for geeks", and "Getting your grandmother to use RSS".

[via John Battelle]

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