Just when the New York Times (NYT) most needs to show it can play in the digital world, it proves its cluelessness over online publishing by demanding Apple remove Pulse an iPad RSS reader.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian tech journalist Adam Turner says the NYT has made “a fool of itself in front of the online audience it so desperately wants to woo”.

Turner is bang on the money.

The NYT says Pulse infringes its rights. But the RSS feed it delivers to iPad readers is publically available and free. Moreover the NYT publishes the feed. When readers see an interesting headline, they click-through to the paper’s own website.

If the NYT doesn’t like this, it could kill its RSS feed.

As Turner points out, in the eyes of the NYT Pulse’s biggest crime isn’t serving up its stories, but doing the job in style.

Australian journalist Renai LeMay says Twitter is journalism.

He has written on the subject on his blog and elsewhere. The best jumping off point for new readers is his Twitter’s impact on media and journalism.

LeMay is a visionary. For my money he has a great grasp of where news journalism and online media may go.

In my earlier post Can Twitter be journalism? I said I agree with him in principle. However, few twittering journos use the technology as an interactive news media.

Most use Twitter as a broadcast medium – like an RSS feed. A number have Twitter accounts, but say nothing of value. Perhaps 40 percent are serious Twitter journalists.

I may have been over optimistic with this estimate. Yesterday the Online Journalism Blog reported on how British newspapers use Twitter. In Newspapers on Twitter – how the Guardian, FT and Times are winning Malcolm Coles writes;

“newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across their 120 official Twitter accounts – with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10.”

This sounds encouraging. Buried further down the story is the comment:

"Out of 120 accounts, just 16 do something other than running as a glorified RSS feed. The other 114 do no retweeting, no replying to other tweets etc"

Coles also points out the newspaper sites rarely follow Twitter users.

Cluetrain barely stopped here

Both these points apply to the bulk of Twittering publications in Australian and New Zealand. My guess is managers encourage journalists to promote stories using the technology, but they are actively discouraged from replying and retweeting.

There’s a precedent for this. After all, hardly any online publications in the region link to titles owned by other publishers – which means they are missing the point of online publishing. Until publishers encourage reporters and editors to engage with their audiences, they are going to miss out on the potential of Twitter.

Of course, the journalists who do really well at this will become media brands in their own right, which will worry the bean counters. But that’s another story…