NYT/AP: Online News Consumers Become Own Editors

[DeepModem Mom]

Online News Consumers Become Own Editors
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 24, 2005


NEW YORK (AP) -- J.D. Lasica used to visit 20 to 30 Web sites for his daily fix of news. Now, he's down to three -- yet he consumes more news online than ever. Lasica is among a growing breed of information consumers who use the latest Internet technologies to completely bypass the home pages of news sites and jump directly to articles that interest them.

He can scan some 200 Web journals and traditional news sites -- all without actually going out and visiting them.

Online news consumers are increasingly taking charge, getting their news a la carte from a variety of outlets. Rarely do they depend on a single news organization's vision of the day's top stories....

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Some Web sites are already responding....(The Washington Post) is happy simply to be one of many sources checked daily. (WP website executive director Jim Brady) sees his home page as a starting point, and during the July 7 bombings in London, the Post even linked to the BBC, something unfathomable a few years ago....(I)n a case of ''if you can't beat them, join them,'' Knight Ridder Inc., Gannett Co. and Tribune Co. collectively bought three-quarters of Topix.net, a startup that provides tools for readers to bypass news home pages. The New York Times has been paying an undisclosed amount to have its headlines featured there....

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Topix provides direct links to news stories it collects and sorts from more than 10,000 sources, and it slices story by category as well as region, down to the ZIP code....


(The story goes on to discuss Google News, Yahoo News, AP, Reuters, AOL News, other news outlet websites, and bloggers, specifically "Markos Moulitsas Zuniga.")


http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-News-A-La-Carte.html?