Let’s say a news outlet wants to fully embrace the open web, indieweb, and maybe even the fediverse. What would your top technical or product asks of them be?
@benwerd Do you mean, like, feature requests? As in what would I expect them to use for their publication? (I'm not sure what a "product ask" is.)
@SimonWoods Yeah, exactly - whereas a tech ask might be “use full-content RSS” or “embrace webmentions”, a product ask might be “let me add context to a story from my own site”.
@benwerd Oh ok, cool. The only product possibilities I can think of are based around comments, for which I would say either: no comments ever, or limited comments that are also moderated by actual full-time staff.
Other than that, my list for such publications:
- Full RSS.
- Ethical advertising (indie, non-Google, etc).
- No infinite scroll.
- .txt version of the site.
- No junky URLs.
- Full accessibility support and guaranteed of adopting such features in the future.
- Clear and obvious bylines.
- Includes full explanation of who writes any story attributed to "staff" or whatever.
- Clearly communicated explanation of the business model (using language anyone can understand).
... I'm probably missing things. Haven't spent enough time learning about how news publications work in generally to have properly vetted these ideas.