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.