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Taking the "paper" out of newspaper

In previous postings I have rambled about disruption in two popular media.

  1. Television - the concept of broadcasting will change to accommodate IPTV, VDO on demand and subscriber specific content
  2. Books - book readers will continue to grow in usage

Well there is a long overdue overhaul for the newspaper. Forget the movies like Minority Report and their vision of a dynamically updating newspaper headline, news is already disrupted.

Look over a colleagues shoulder and check out what they have on their RSS feeds. My habits have changed since being in Thailand where there is a limited supply of English language newspapers. The Nation and The Bangkok Post both do a good job but I need more. TV based news is Thai, unless you want to pay large amounts of money to the UBC monopoly, in which case you can get BBC World.

So with these restrictions I went out and found a decent RSS reader and subscribe to varying forms of news inputs.

For UK and International news I get a feed from the BBC, as close to current as you can get. I will also get a feed from other countries to get a balanced perspective, something that you can't always get from a newspaper.

Not a big sports fan so doesn't matter too much, I have a series of feeds from bloggers and websites on trends in the area I work in.

I'm basically building my own news sheet, tuning it to put the weighting into the things I care about and [for now] it's free. I pay for the ADSL anyway to be able to get Internet access.

As mobile devices getter smarter and more feature reach with dual mode capabilities; the day of the offline news is coming to an end. As the pace life continues to increase exponentially yesterdays news is no good for anyone. The media companies face a challenging transition on how to bring that journalism expertise into today's world of PDA's, book readers and RSS.

Blog Ping Echoes

TechDirt on the challenge ahead

Steve Outing (via Seth Godin) using Seth's "small is the new big" for context

James Seng and his ongoing discussion on what is a media

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