Sunday, December 10, 2017

NYT moves columnist blogs into a controlled venue -- with some deprecated RSS

The NYT has moved Krugman’s blog to a new platform. I presume this is true for all their journalists. The NYT RSS index still points to his now frozen blog at nytimes.com/blogs/krugman. 

So what’s the new platform?

K wrote that posts will show up on his regular columnist page: nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman. That page has an RSS feed. Of course, as is the norm these days, the page does not indicate the feed exists. It has an odd structure

www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman/rss.xml

When I added the feed to Feedbin it displayed in a strange sequence — without the publication date. So the source RSS may be malformed. It’s possible the NYT will fix this.

I note that the footer for the post from 12/9/2017 still points to his old blog “The Conscience of a Liberal”. 

It looks like the NYT is sort-of keeping it’s RSS feeds around, but the transition is at least a bit messy. I can’t tell how one distinguishes K blog posts from his “print” articles, they seem to share one stream. That has to make his writing more formal and more controlled. Which is perhaps the point. 

I am reminded again of an unfortunate side-effect of the ad-funded internet. “Free” media streams now target the easily manipulated populations, typically to serve causes of the corporate and wealthy, often to persuade  the credulous to act against their own interests. They are essentially parasitic. Pay streams can be excellent, but they are only accessible to a small minority.

2 comments:

MaysonicWrites said...

This seems to work for me… http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html?rss=1

JGF said...

I'd been using:
http://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman/rss.xml

It gives the same result as yours:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html?rss=1

Yours is cleaner though.