2007
08.09
08.09
Why don’t newspapers offer their classifieds to other sites (bloggers, partners other papers in the chain) in an AdSense-like model?
You know, with the addition of some JavaScript your site could run a little widget with an ad in it tailored to the content on your site. And you get paid for it to boot.
Just a thought.
I asked our developers about your comment on the DC widget and got this response:
I do understand what these comments are asking for. They are asking for the ability to gather feeds from any the the McClatchy papers. The widget currently offered is a branded, packaged list of the top five headlines from the McClatchy Washington Bureau as displayed on the front page of news.mcclatchy.com. It is not a feed per se, but a standalone widget that contains data that is also present in the rss feed for the news.mcclatchy.com site.
In fact, rss feeds already exist (they have for quite some time) for nearly every section of every McClatchy newpaper’s website. As described in the comments, a savvy user could parse whatever pieces of content they want from any number of these feeds into whatever custom widget they want to create.
Some of the sites have pages listing the available feeds; for example, the DC bureau has a list of available feeds at http://www.mcclatchydc.com/181. Most of the pages on the McClatchy sites have links to the rss feeds for that section. Additionally, modern broswers such as Firefox 2 and IE 7 can automatically detect when feeds are available for website, allowing you to view and subscribe to them. Simply, the content is already available.
Savvy users, eh?
RSS is cool and all, but to parse it via JavaScript I need to make a local copy of the RSS feed, usually by running a server-side script on a schedule. If you could wrap it in a JavaScript handler I could source it via an HTML <script> tag (like several of the APIs I listed).
Additionally your RSS feeds lack information. Yeah they have the headline and the link, but we’re information providers, we can do better than that. Include the lede, the byline and some keywords or tags that I can also use to massage your headlines into my… whatever.
Finally, your RSS feeds vary ever so slightly site by site. While this may seem pedantic, it matters a lot when your coding around them. Some feeds are missing the “guid” field, some are missing the “pubDate” field… some have the date but the format is off.
But really, some would ask, does this matter? How many users are really gonna code up their own mashups with McClatchy headlines? My answer to that is that all it would take is one to make something “insanely great” and all it costs is a few hours of developer time.