Reading the papers vs getting your news via RSS
Published July 27th, 2005 in E-PRI’m a big addict of RSS, it’s revolutionised the way I surf the web and get news updates. However there’s nothing like getting your hands on a newspaper to get a better insight of what’s going on.
Interpreting the news is completely different through RSS or by newspaper. With RSS you get news instantly and the number of stories on the same subject coming in gives you an indication of how important it is. However when you take in factors from a newspaper like the size of the article, its positioning or what page it features on, how you interpret a story could be completely different.
In terms of an emotive response I’m much more drawn to hard copy. Take the London bombings as an example, I got the news through RSS, but the story really rammed home when I saw the front pages the next day.
I hope print is around for a long time, I’ll always stick with it. Take Wired for example. Ed is always slagging me because I go out and buy the magazine every month, when he reads it online for free. I do both, but I prefer to have it in my hands to read through it. One of the downsides of RSS is that I now tend to skip through feeds because I read a lot of them.
There’s lots of people out there crying out for newspapers to be replaced by some e-version, I for one hope that a happy medium can exist.
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You know I don’t read any hard copy stuff (apart from books) at all any more, it’s just too tedious.
But I hear you on the downside of RSS … I miss LOADS of great stuff everyday, just because I don’t have time to read it as it’s maybe not as relevant to my job as others. Plus getting 300ish headlines a day makes you ‘weed’ out stuff you’d probably read if it was in the paper or a magazine.
And I don’t read Wired on-line only because it’s free … it’s just easier! (Mind you … that’s one of the subscriptions that really suffering - interesting articles, but not job-relevant and that’s all I seem to have time for).
I think people heralded an end to print media when radio came along, then TV and even the Internet. Now with RSS it is so very easy to get the news you want delivered straight to your desktop, but I still prefer print media in many cases.
For one I can’t read too much on screen stuff and my attention span seems to be shorter than normal, maybe because it’s easier to scroll through an article to the paragraphs that concern you more.
A newspaper also gives you a ton of stories and often you end up reading pieces that you wouldn’t usually bother with.
Newspapers have survived the TV age because they were seen as a way to give more indepth coverage to a piece, where TV news would only be able to devote a small amount of time. While Internet news offers the possibility of unlimited space to each story it is also based heavily on breaking news and so can often only report to the same depth as TV (in fact, while I love BBC News Online its articles tend to be the same as the Ceefax news pages, perhaps slightly longer).
I also like to have something in my hands, and like the fact that a newspaper can always be there for whatever time you decide to have a quiet cup of coffee or a poo! (my laptop doesn’t have wireless!)
I think Print media still has a lot of life left in it and I don’t think it will be replaced by online content. I think the Internet is probably the biggest threat it has faced, however, as it can offer everything print can except for the paper!