I’m not a journalist. I work with lots of them, though, and I feel at home in an environment that pulses with the rhythms of news. So, when I spoke to Gavin O’Malley of MediaPost on Thursday to answer his questions about Newsburst, I felt fairly comfortable.
Instead, I feel mildly frustrated by use of my words. I know most every person ever interviewed feels this way. In my case, a conversation that spanned more than 20 minutes resulted in two quotes, neither of which express what I meant. Did I say the words I’m reported to say? I didn’t record my answers, so who knows?
The article is Online News Sites Struggle With RSS Challenge in MediaPost, published this morning. In it, O’Malley uses the coincidence of the Bloglines sale, the Newsburst preview release, and the Consenda trial for the LA Times and Guardian newspapers to make a point: moves by news sites in the RSS space are defensive. Speaking only for Newsburst… he’s wrong. RSS is an incredible opportunity for CNET as a whole and News.com in particular. I’m going to avoid stepping over a line I shouldn’t, so I’ll stop there and just say (again) that RSS is an opportunity, not a threat, and there are numbers to prove it.
From the article, here’s my first quote:
CNET’s Newsburst reader, now available as a preview release, is not a typical RSS reader because it adds an “editorial touch,” said John Roberts, vice president of product development at CNET. The service is essentially an edited version of the Internet’s entire daily news offerings. “I expect all or most publishers to do this in order to try and hang on to readers and control the environment,” Roberts added.
I do expect more aggregators, from all sorts of companies, especially publishers. I don’t remember saying “hang on to readers and control the environment.” My point was that aggregation is a reader service, so anyone that cares about readers has to think about how to serve them. No one is “hanging on to readers” — they are in control, and can let go anytime. To bastardize Sting’s romantic phrasing on Valentine’s Day, if you love your readers, set them free. Newsburst offers some programming if you want it (Today Online), but you’re free to ignore that and use the application for anything and everything you care about.
In the second quote, I obviously wasn’t clear enough between RSS and Newsburst, which are not the same thing, despite the fact that Newsburst uses RSS.
CNET’s John Roberts said Newsburst did not yet have a viable business model. “I’ve spoken with a number of firms that serve ads over RSS feeds, and I haven’t found a compelling model just yet, but we’ll continue to listen and respond as the market matures.”
The quote is accurate; the lead-in is not. So far, as noted above, the traffic RSS brings to the website has been reward enough. I’ll leave it there.
Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day.