I don’t know if it’s just me, but every week it seems like it gets harder and harder to find a news site that has anything different from other news websites, especially when it comes to newspaper websites.
I’m gonna have to do Google Reader this week because I can’t find anything else worth writing about. I really need to find that handout Dr. Lowrey gave us with the list of sites.
When I heard Justin Thurman talking about Google Reader, it didn’t seem like my cup of tea. But, one day, back when we actually had free time, I tried it out and loved it. I know it has absolutely no visual element to it, but you got to give it credit for uber-convenience.
In case some of you aren’t familiar with this site. It basically takes RSS feeds from different news organizations and allows you to subscribe to them (I think anyway). They are sent to your Google Reader account and set up much like an e-mail system. Instead of a subject heading, it’s a headline. You can click on a headline to get a brief synopsis of the story and click on the synopsis to link to the actual story on its original website. You can star certain items and mark the rest as read. Also, you can organize your subscriptions into folders.
I know it’s a stretch, but I think community news organizations could make use of something like this. Maybe have readers set up an account where the content they prefer will be the first to display.
At the very least, I think local news organizations can make their news more applicable to Google Reader. Each of my subscriptions differ in how they appear on Reader. The Tuscaloosa News for example only displays a brief sentence about the story when you click on its headline. However, G4 often has photos, much longer synopses (often the entire story) and video.
I don’t know how difficult it would be to make your RSS feed more Google Reader friendly. But if newspapers could do it without spending a bunch of money or man-hours, they could potentially bring a lot more eyes to their website.
Now, if we could only figure out how to make the website profitable we would really be onto something. See you guys in 12 hours.
