BJ students handle my dirty trick
Last week I offered HK$100 to whoever could find the news feed on SCMP.com. This was actually a joke – as all of you discovered there are no feeds for SCMP text content, though there is a podcast feed.
My trick was exposed in the Friday evening MJ class and I had to admit what I was up to. However, the challenge I posed did lead to some useful discoveries by enterprising BJ students.
Gie found an unofficial SCMP headline feed created by NewsLookup.com.
Joyce e-mailed me to let me know that she had found a del.icio.us page that somebody had used to bookmark a pseudo citizen journalism section of the SCMP. That in itself isn’t a feed, and it was definitely not an official SCMP feed. You can, however, subscribe to a feed of the “scmp” tag in del.icio.us. Don’t worry if you don’t know what I’m talking about here – we will cover del.icio.us and tagging soon after the Chinese New Year.
Fi-on displayed excellent journalistic instincts by contacting the SCMP directly and asking them where their feed is. She got the following reply:
Dear Fion,
We appreciate your enquiry and concerns.
At the moment we are in the midst of a site redesign which will include the integration of new functionalities and features, including enhanced content search, site personalisation and article clipping, RSS feed access, and faster page load times. Content organization and categorization will also be improved to ensure your site experience is enhanced.
Launch of the new scmp.com website is planned for later this quarter, and we expect its release and the significant investment behind it will address similar concerns expectations of our subscribers as you have voiced.
That said, we can always do better and your comments are very important to our focus on continuous improvement. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact us again.
Kind regards,
Scmp.com
I wonder if the SCMP would let us Beta-test their redesigned site before its release? That would be cool. Maybe we should ask them. What do you think? Interested?
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New Media Workshop » Blog Archive » More on the SCMP’s web presence and nonexistent newsfeed
February 15, 2007 @ 9:51 pm
[...] Peter is now tied with Fi-on for journalistic initiative in the face of my challenge dirty trick, offering $100 to whoever finds the SCMP’s (nonexistent) newsfeeds. While Fi-on e-mailed the SCMP and received a response informing her that a revamp of the website is coming soon, Peter picked up the phone. He writes: I called the customer service desk and spoke to two people working on the desk. The first person I spoke to did not know what RSS was and seemed skeptical about my admittedly lay person’s explanation. The fact that even someone who works in customer service for a big media organisation has no knowledge of RSS/Newsfeeds is perhaps symptomatic of the general population’s ignorance on this issue. The second person I spoke to was fully informed and told me that a full RSS service would be launched in March. I think I deserve the HK$100 prize for initiative. [...]