Teaching Examples

Maybe you look at your local newspaper’s home page. But then, maybe you are a newspaper journalist. Go ask someone else if they look at your newspaper’s home page. You definitely ought to ask my 18- to 24-year-old students if THEY ever look at your newspaper’s home page.

Several people have written about this recently. Jeff Jarvis hit it big-time on Tuesday (After the Page), but in a sense, several subsequent posts he has made are very much about the same topic. You might not think so at first: He wrote about CBS’s acquisition of Last.fm (my students have been all over Last.fm for at least three years already, by the way); he wrote that “GoogleNews is our newsstand and newspaper truck and billboard” because it sends people to news sites; he wrote about Facebook, which college students check almost as often as they look at their cell phones; he wrote about Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, which has made RSS so easy, even a newspaperman can do it.

No, I’m not trying to drive you over to Jarvis’s site, BuzzMachine. I’m trying to point out that all these topics connect to the value of the home page — which might be lower than you imagine.

Journalist Jillian Burt took these ideas out on a long and delightful spin earlier today (or tomorrow, in fact, because she’s in Australia and it’s already June 3 there):

The first thing I read every day, over my first coffee of the day, is the Australian Associated Press newsfeeds on the home section of my Australian e-mail account, after I’ve logged in. I’ve expanded that to include RSS feeds of local news from the various Australian states. In fact the news reports on agriculture and food production in Australia I’ve been writing … [were] in response to newswire stories I was reading every time I’d open up my e-mail.

The first thing I read every day is the custom Google front I’ve configured to show me the BBC News headlines, my local daily’s RSS, The Washington Post, Techmeme, GoogleNews, and Tailrank. As an added bonus, my Gmail appears there too.

Are News Home Pages Over?

I’ve come to realize that I rarely look at any news site’s home page.

This is not to say I think the majority of people are like me. But surely I am not unusual in my newsreading habits — I know I’m not, because I meet many people who approach the news the same way. Like Jillian Burt, I read my news feeds as I sip my first coffee of the day.

Steve Yelvington wrote yesterday that the physical act of reading a newspaper is not always about getting informed:

If you read a newspaper while eating lunch, you can entertain yourself while feeding yourself. Or perhaps you’re using it to avoid people you really don’t want to talk with. Or escape the uncomfortable feeling that you’re dining alone in a crowded restaurant. Or whatever.

His point is that when most of us have an iPhone — or a similar Internet-always-on device with a lucious, readable screen — we will be able to meet those needs by sticking our face in the device, instead of into a newspaper. We may never buy another magazine in the airport … oh, yeah, we still can’t be online while in the air, darn it.

So even now, many people are relying not on your home page but rather on their own personal collections, aggregations, compilations.

And in the future, when people’s eyeballs are fixed on those little portable devices for all their information gathering, time wasting, and entertainment needs, I would be willing to bet that your home page is absolutely NOT a destination for them.

The question is: What are you doing about it? How are you preparing for this?

New York Times Getting Ready

Jillian Burt wrote about a brand-new service from the Times:

This afternoon I spent an hour or so configuring my ‘My Times’ page at the New York Times, after receiving this e-mail this morning, an invitation for me to ‘personalise’ NYTimes.com, “with guidance (if you want it) from Times reporters and editors. If you’ve already tried My Times, you’ll find a lot of improvements. The response is much faster. You can now create multiple My Times pages, to group your sources by category or interest. The search results have been improved. And there are new widgets that let you add weather, New York Times crosswords, local movie show times, Flickr photos and other information to your page.”

It’s essentially the same as My Yahoo!, a collecting of news feeds. My Times allows for story summaries, and there’s a more diverse and unusual set of feeds to choose from, picked by New York Times correspondents (not the ones that I read, however, and whose reading material I would have been interested in bookmarking).

Now, I don’t know why Burt is so lucky — when I go to my.nytimes.com, all I get is: “My Times is currently in development. Subscribe to the notification list and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.” But I’m certainly intrigued by what Burt wrote.

Again, I ask — if you work for a news organization: What are you doing about this? Are you ready?

Technorati tags: online journalism | online media | newspapers | future