Two of the newest and most relevant developments in online journalism
are RSS feeds and podcasts. The first is a means of accessing website
content without having to visit the site itself. The second is a video
or audio clip that can be downloaded straight onto your mp3 player
– often by RSS. The two technologies have only recently become
mainstream, and as such, the ethical implications of their expansion
are relatively unforeseeable.
Student in Germany listening to podcast
RSS
RSS has served as an acronym for various descriptions
of the technology, including “really simple syndication,”
“rich site summary,” and “RDF site summary.”
Essentially, it is a computer file format that downloads straight
from a content provider – website, blog, e-zine – to
the computers of registered users.
The technology was developed in the second half
of the 1990s but only became popular after the turn of the century.
The New York Times set a standard for other online publications
in 2002 when it began offering RSS news feeds. By 2005, Apple and
Microsoft had both updated their web browsers (Safari and Internet
Explorer) to include RSS feed capabilities, and since then RSS has
been adopted by rapidly proliferating numbers of news sites and
websites.
In some ways, RSS feeds have answered the busy
21st century news-reader’s calls for easy-access information.
Information arrives at a subscriber’s computer every time
a content provider updates its website. Readers get their news as
soon as it’s posted – web surfing and site-checking
are no longer required. Also, unlike newsletter emails, RSS feeds
arrive at users’ computers via aggregators, which collect
all the incoming RSS feeds, condense them onto one page, and organize
them – by date, publication, type, etc – somewhat like
Google News. [*note: Google and Yahoo both have homepage sites with
RSS readers built in].
It also evens the playing field for big media
and bloggers: in your own media aggregator, you can access the Daily
Kos and The Globe and Mail at the same time and instantly
see which has more informative news for the day.
For better or worse (or neither), RSS has expanded
far beyond basic news syndication. RSS feeds export music playlists,
lists of Top-100 books, and droves of personal blogs. In the fall
of 2006, Microsoft announced that it would update its RSS software
to become capable of managing e-commerce.
A new implication of RSS’s rapid proliferation
is a whole new brand of news fatigue. Jeffrey
Veen, a consultant and design manager for Google, described
the phenomenon as a life of “un-bolding”. As he wrote
in a 2004 blog post, “I think RSS and blogs and news aggregators
had finally gotten the best of me. There were literally hundreds
of subscriptions haunting me each day; a bright red counter showing
unread posts creeping up into the thousands.”
A financial dilemma evolves for news providers
if readers, exhausted by incoming news, begin only scanning headlines.
If readers avoid going to websites, then advertisers lose incentive
to buy advertising space. Monetizing RSS feeds has been a quagmire.
Charging fees for readers to access feeds would be problematic,
since the content can be accessed free at the provider’s website,
but publications need money to come from somewhere.
Setting up classified sections for RSS has been
one of the easiest solutions, and it has been extremely beneficial
for some content providers. RSS aggregator Feedster www.feedster.com
has partnered with job listing sites, combining job posts from different
sources and providing users with a more complete job list than a
single provider could offer.
Alternately, some websites are selling RSS advertisements.
Slate.com often
includes an advertiser’s logo under its news blurb. Somewhat
more invasively, other sites actually create RSS “articles”
that advertise products and are listed along with headlines. Besides
opening new floodgates for unwanted messages, the system also enables
clever advertisers to hide their promotions in standard news form,
misleading readers to believe that ads are news content. Making
ads distinguishable from news is a dilemma that news providers will
face in the coming months and years.
Advertisement issues aside, other ethical implications
of RSS feeds fall in line with the dilemmas presented in this website’s
New Media Trends
section, including the elimination of a newspaper editor as gatekeeper
for readers.
JD Lasica researched RSS in 2003, early in its
popularization. One of his interviewees, journalist Shayne Bowman
predicted at the time that “RSS feeds will start replacing
e-mail newsletters because they do a better job of providing structure
and a more efficient means of parsing through data."
Podcasts
Podcasts take RSS technology to the next level
– they are video or audio clips that download straight to
subscribers’ computers and mp3 players. Like RSS-fed news
stories, podcasts are sent from content providers as soon as they
are created. Unlike news stories, they are multi-media, and though
they were slow to enter the mainstream media, they took the blogosphere
by storm. Tony Khan of the Boston public radio station WGBH likened
the mainstream media’s attempt to learn podcasting to “
an elephant learning how to tap dance,” in a 2006 interview
with JD Lasica. Citizen journalists’ inclination to experiment
with diverse technologies, sources of information and production
styles, coupled with their willingness to syndicate raw, sometimes
unimpressive video made them prime producers of podcasts. “The
thing about podcasting,” explained Khan, “is that you
can implement your ideas relatively quickly. The big ideas don’t
stay abstract, they can be applied right away.”
Mark Glaser of the Online Journalism Review has
suggested that, in radio journalism’s decline (“a victim
of massive corporate buyouts,” he calls the medium) podcasting
may revolutionize broadcast media. In a way, he says, podcasts are
the TiVo
of radio – subscribers can access the information they want
whenever they want it.
Predicting the ethical dilemmas and production
trends of podcasting, however, is a difficult task. “Any time
somebody wants a definitive answer about what’s going on,
what’s a trend and will it continue, my impulse is to say
try not to even think in terms of certainties and trends –
it’s too early,” said Khan. Trends aside, Khan is optimistic
about the level of creativity and the pace of innovation in podcasting.
Lasica is loath to predict ethical quandaries
for podcasting because he sees it as very similar to (and integrated
with) pre-existing citizen journalism. As such, many of the ethical,
and inherently legal, issues pertain to copyright. Citizen journalism
has often turned copyright on its head, incorporating the concept
of “creative commons” into most blogged material. But
legal implications abound, especially when podcasts can contain
copyrighted video clips.
Lawyer Colette Vogele created a Podcasting
Legal Guide based on the Electric Frontier Foundation’s
Legal Guide for Bloggers. Like Lasica, she sees podcasting ethics
paralleling blogging ethics. “Cross-linking and mentioning
contributors in [podcast] show notes seems to be very commonplace
and a known ‘best practice’,” she says. Plus,
many podcasters are already familiar with Creative Commons copyright
licenses. “One core value of those licenses relates to properly
attributing others' works.”
