So long, NY Times RSS feeds

Today is a sad day. Today's the day I turned off Paul Krugman and Freakonomics in my RSS reader.

Not because the stuff those guys write isn't any good. Far from it. It's just that the NY Times adopts a stupid, blunt cut-off strategy on their RSS feeds, so I only ever get a truncated slice of meaningless prose.

Why do people do this? When we launched our blogs at MessyMedia, we did take the decision to cut short longer posts, because we want to get the balance right between encouraging RSS readers (where we don't make any money) and clickthroughs to the site (where we do). I guess about one in every three posts is cut short with the extended text on the site.

But the point is we make an editorial decision to cut the text short. We do it, for instance, at the end of a para, not halfway through a sentence. By the time you get to the jump, you know if you want to read on or not and, crucially, you know what the stories about.

Not so with the NY Times feeds. They're cut off short, mechanically and in their prime. It's particularly stupid because the whole point of blogs for a newspaper site is to allow a more discursive, free-flowing style. In other words, the point of the story might not be in the first sentence, as with a traditional news story. It might not come around to the second or third para. So I never seem to get enough data to decide whether to click through to the full story. So I never do. So I'm killing the feeds.

Shame, really. I'll miss Krazy Krugman (I'm A Liberal, Me!) and Dilettante Dubner (See How This Baggage Carousel Says Something About The Human Condition).