Why can't a newspaper be more like a blog?
Barry Parr asks the question on his
MediaSavvy blog (
http://mediasavvy.com/). The five parter, which is fairly short, raises, among other things, the issues of
RSS, trackbacks, allowing comment and keeping newspaper archives open with permanent URLs. He also stresses
the importance of local or community content. The first piece is at
http://mediasavvy.com/archives/000475.shtml. From there, you can link to the rest. Well worth a look.
I like his take on news archiving. He says: "
After a couple of weeks, they [online newspapers] remove stories not only from their home page, but from their Web site. The original URL is broken, and readers who followed a link to the story are invited to search the paper's archives for it and pay money to get a look at it." Not all newspapers work this way - the UK
Guardian (
www.guardian.co.uk/) has an open archive, and its existence probably drives a ton of traffic to its site that would more than make up for any lost revenue from selling articles.
Posted by belinda at June 18, 2004 10:16 AM