Why does ABC News hide The Note?
ABC News has produced a daily column simply called The Note since the beginning of 2002, according to Wikipedia. For political junkies and Washington’s inside-the-beltway “chattering classes,” it’s an essential read that takes a Big Picture look at the nation’s political state of affairs, and then drills in and links out to the must-read stories of the day.
So The Note has been around for almost seven years, a lifetime in politics and a lifetime online. It’s famous and infamous in political circles, with a loyal and passionate readership.
So the question is: why does ABC News hide The Note on its website?
Head to the front page of ABC News, and there are a bunch of political stories and blogs highlighted, but no sign of The Note. Make your way to the Politics section, and The Note makes no appearance above the fold. Scroll down, and finally you can find a small area called The Note amongst five others listed below a More Political News heading.
Ah, you say, just grab the RSS feed so you don’t have to take such effort to grab your favorite political column while spilling coffee on yourself in the morning. Well, not so much. There’s no direct RSS feed to grab The Note. Tauntingly, there is an RSS link right near the top of the page, but it’s a general RSS feed for political news. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and buried amongst a dozen links in a More Coverage section is a link to Sign Up for The Note!
So, if you really want The Note delivered to you, if you’re really determined, you can register for ABC News, submit a username and a password, and then have The Note delivered to an e-mail address each day. I actually did this for a while, years ago, but was disappointed with the delay (in hours) it took for the column to reach me.
Is ABC News actively burying one of its best known and most popular columns? Maybe they’re focused on grabbing e-mail addresses for marketing purposes (even though you have to be nearly obsessed to find the link to Sign Up for The Note!)?
My best guess is that ABC News is an enormous organization and that conflicting interests and legacy ideas are conspiring to hide high quality content away from readers.
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April 21st, 2008 at 10:09 am
If anyone wants an RSS feed for The Note, I made a quick feed of it in Yahoo! Pipes (http://feeds.feedburner.com/abcthenote). Hopefully this will help until ABC gets its act together.
April 21st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Outstanding Michael, thanks !
May 15th, 2008 at 7:51 am
Very helpful. Thanks a lot.
I find the note useful as well. Even if it is pretty much in the tank of the day at ABC.
May 25th, 2008 at 5:29 am
More sites could use this form of observation and critique. I’m curious: did you attempt to contact anybody at ABC with your question? How easy do they make that? If not, perhaps a follow-up is in order.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Tom, I didn’t personally contact them.
Obviously, this site doesn’t have the visibility of a mainstream media publication, and in fact it’s not an “A List blog.” That said, very very often when I critique an online-only publication (Mashable and Valleywag as widely read and recent examples) I hear directly from someone at the publication.
Which means that those pubs are paying attention to what’s being said about them.
See what I’m getting at here?
June 27th, 2008 at 8:41 am
[…] I head to ABCNews.com as I do most mornings to check out The Note, an indispensible daily guide to what’s going on in the political scene. (I talk about the strange ways in which ABC News buries The Note here.) […]