New York Times dumb panic halts iPad RSS app

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

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

Turner is bang on the money.

RSS can't infringe rights, but the NYT thinks it can

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

In other words, the Pulse app delivers thousands of new readers to the New York Post website each day.

If the NYT doesn’t like this influx of lucrative new business, 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.

More about RSS

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication is a standardised way of giving readers fast access to web feeds. And as the name suggests, it's simple too. You can use it to track activity on web sites. Newspapers often run RSS feeds of their latest stories.

Some browsers let you read RSS, but these days the job is better with a feed reader app like NetNewsWire.

And, in case you were wondering, this site has an RSS feed. You are welcome to use it.