Would you call/count this as “off-site reach”? This seems countable and perhaps the best metric to gauge success, assuming you can monetize it.

it should be clarified that Reuters opened its content via tha API only for non-commercial use (like the BBC did quite some time ago). Would be interesting to learn about their stance wrt. ad supported blogs.

Since Reuters licensed Attributors technology they should be able to detect easily where these feeds are used for commercial purposes / are very likely to generate a non-trivial amount of money

BTW. signed up immediately and got accepted into the program. They definitely get it. Instead of trying to promote news industry standard formats that nobody in the web world cares about (e.g. IPTC, NITF, NewsML) they are offering their content in all the important web formats ATOM, Media RSS, RSS and even JSON. Will report back when i found some time to do some experiments

Unfortunately they only provide separate text, photo and video feeds.

A couple of years ago I wrote a memo and did a presentation for the people at my place. They were complaining about Google and Digg and all the sites that were “stealing” their content. I argued that it didn’t matter how people got to our content as long as they knew it was our content. I pointed out that we could build our information silo and then allow the same content to be distributed in countless different ways. It didn’t cost us a thing and, if our content was compelling, might bring in a lot of different people from a number of vectors we were not even considering. I thought I saw a light go on in the editor’s eyes, but here we are nearly three years later and they are still afraid of RSS, SMS and mobile presentation. Forget about widgets, APIs and all that other new fangled gobbledygook.

In the past newspapers didn’t have to think much about who their audience was or how to reach them. Certainly their audience had little leverage to demand anything from the newspaper. Times have changed drastically. At least some of the trouble newspapers are facing is due directly to the inability to adapt. What happens next is simply darwinian.

With Twitter there are not annoying teasers and ‘More at eleven…’ garbage like network newscasts use in a desperate attempt to keep their viewers on the edge of their seats.

Why do you care how folk count hits? Count *money* not hits… The real measure of success will not be how many people read the stuff but rather how much we pay the writers.

bob wyman

I think you’re spot on; however, I wouldn’t categorize it as either/or. News organizations need to allow people to consume news when and wherever they want.

But that’s only the first of many steps.

They need to find ways to allow people to engage with each other (NING, MeetUp), they need to include community managers who can actively engage and get information from the community, they need to build databases that give us context (that is what computer networks give us - the news is quickly becoming irrelevant in those terms) and they need to move away from the belief that the banner/advertising model is the future.

So many things need to change — and are changeable.

Just one small note — the “if the news is that important, it will find me” quote (which I wrote about here: http://tinyurl.com/ynsep4) came from a focus group that Jane Buckingham of the Intelligence Group did, which Brian quotes in the story.