Remember when breaking news could actually be printed in the newspaper & people would not giggle at the site of that. I think we all are aware that other than well written Op-ed pieces, there is really no reason to print a newspaper since all of the news in there has been available online for 12 – 48 hours already. Oh, and the Op-ed pieces that are so great were already posted online earlier too.
USA Today launched a news aggregator site in public beta yesterday which shows a live feed of stories as broken into 8 different categories. I don’t want to say “I told you so, but….” (*cough >> Newssift << *cough).
On a serious note, I am sure that USA Today was well underway with their news aggregator site long before I wrote my little piece on Newssift. Whenever they started work on this little project, who cares & kudos to them for doing it. Now they need to make sure that they are streaming in real time news and extend the deck/app to a mobile version. Finally, they need to go ahead and begin to slowly eliminate the paper version alltogether over the next 5 years (...why 5, because it is an arbitrary number that sounds good).
I checked out Newssift today, and I must admit it was a pretty nice way to read the news. Yet another nail in the coffin for Ye Olde Newspaper industry.
Side Thought: …Seriously, it must be really freakin weird down at the old Daily Bugle, or Weekly Gazette to write all those stories about how the Newspaper industry is quickly heading to the grave. I wonder if the writers, proofers, and editors just wander around the pit all dead-man-walking style and go through their routine and publish these stories about their own demise as if it were any other obituary…
Newssift reminds me a lot of addictomatic, but what sets it apart from other aggregators is the superior information architecture that it delivers for the search/ topic results page. The message hierarchy and overall layout is perfect for quick skimming (i.e. how people actually read), and I love the dashboard of graphs along the left side of the page.
I think this is what we will see as the ultimate replacement for the gasping Newspaper industry. The news organizations that are in the most power should adopt this Newssift style as a replacement for their existing printed news quickly. There will not be a need for thousands of independent newspapers down to the local level, so those who adopt this approach and perfect it now will reap the rewards.
Either way R.I.P for newspapers. I admit that I will miss the feel of a good new paper on a Sunday …but will get over it and enjoy reading it on a Kindle or whatever improvement replaces that.
