Partial Freakonomics feed = bad idea
I'm a huge fan of the Freakonomics guys, and a subscriber to their RSS feed, but I didn't realize until I saw a MediaPost item on Techmeme that they had been "acquired" by the New York Times. I also didn't realize until I read through the item …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Freakonomics blog's move to the New York Times reached many of its own subscribers secondhand — via a MediaPost item surfacing on Techmeme rather than any notice in the feed itself — which is exactly the failure mode Mathew Ingram is pointing at: the feed went headline-only, so readers who thought they were following the blog discovered the deal only because someone else wrote about it.
Ingram's objection fits a thread he has been pulling since at least 2006, when he framed RSS as the defining sharing-and-syndication shift of the post-2001 web and joined the running debate over the copyright status of feeds. With the Times now owning the blog, the partial feed reads as a test of how much of that open-syndication bargain a traditional publisher will honor once it controls the asset.
First-order effects
- Freakonomics RSS subscribers lose full-text delivery and must click through to the New York Times site for each post, converting a direct subscription relationship into owned pageviews.
- The New York Times takes over an audience built under an open feed model it did not create, inheriting both its reach and its expectations.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers weighing blog acquisitions now have a live case study in whether truncating feeds retains or burns the subscriber base they just paid for.
- Readers who feel shortchanged have a ready-made grievance narrative — feed truncation was already a flashpoint in the 2005-2006 usability and copyright debates around RSS — making the move a reputational risk beyond one blog.
Third-order effects
- If acquiring publishers systematically convert full-text feeds into teasers, RSS shifts from a reader-first distribution channel back into a marketing funnel for destination sites, reviving the unresolved questions about who controls syndicated content.
- The episode hardens a split in publishing strategy between platforms that win by pushing content out to readers and outlets that win by pulling readers in — with acquisitions like this one deciding which logic governs formerly independent voices.
The trend: As legacy publishers acquire independently built blogs, they are probing how far they can trade open-feed distribution for on-site traffic without destroying the audience they bought.