Online News Consumers Become Own Editors
This is so true. I hate visiting news home pages. They are full of sports stories--I could care less--and other sorts of junk. RSS is the best thing since sliced bread. I just wish more content providers would use this--not just news sites.
I run two blogs. This one, on technology trends in Communications, as well as a political commentary blog related to Latino and immigration issues. I read and process a ton of news every day, and for the most part, I rarely go to the home pages.
I run two blogs. This one, on technology trends in Communications, as well as a political commentary blog related to Latino and immigration issues. I read and process a ton of news every day, and for the most part, I rarely go to the home pages.
NEW YORK - J.D. Lasica used to visit 20 to 30 Web sites for his daily fix of news. Now, he's down to three — yet he consumes more news online than ever. Lasica is among a growing breed of information consumers who use the latest Internet technologies to completely bypass the home pages of news sites and jump directly to articles that interest them.
He can scan some 200 Web journals and traditional news sites — all without actually going out and visiting them.
Online news consumers are increasingly taking charge, getting their news a la carte from a variety of outlets. Rarely do they depend on a single news organization's vision of the day's top stories.
"The old idea of surfers coming to your Web site and coming to your front door, that's going away," said Lasica, a former editor at The Sacramento Bee. "People are going to come in through the side window, through the basement, through the attic, anyway they want to."
Some Web sites are already responding.
"When we all started this 10 years ago, we wanted to be the one and only place people come to," said Jim Brady, executive editor of The Washington Post's Web site.
These days, he said, the Post is happy simply to be one of many sources checked daily. He sees his home page as a starting point, and during the July 7 bombings in London, the Post even linked to the BBC, something unfathomable a few years ago.
The Post and Knight Ridder Digital, meanwhile, are redesigning Web sites to spread elements previously found only on home pages.
And in a case of "if you can't beat them, join them," Knight Ridder Inc., Gannett Co. and Tribune Co. collectively bought three-quarters of Topix.net, a startup that provides tools for readers to bypass news home pages. The New York Times has been paying an undisclosed amount to have its headlines featured there.
Topix provides direct links to news stories it collects and sorts from more than 10,000 sources, and it slices story by category as well as region, down to the ZIP code.
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