A Case Made Against RSS. When newspapers began publishing online editions, they failed to remember why their newsprint editions need Circulation departments. Imagine if your local newspaper didn’t deliver copies to homes, offices, or newsstands, that the publisher assumed anyone who wanted to read a copy would remember to go to the newspaper’s location and retrieve each copy page by page. As one publishing pioneer told a newspaper conference: “Putting up a news Web site is like rolling the presses in the middle of the night and leaving articles on the dock for readers to pick up one at a time.” A Web site delivers nothing; its contents await retreival. That makes the Web not a very apt online technology for publishing newspapers. It was and is a critical disadvantage overlooked by most newspaper executives who publish online. In the 1990s, those executives were from Editorial and Advertising departments, who had never worked in Circulation… [Digital Deliverance]
