Many businesses periodically send newsletters by postal mail to keep subscribers current on their affairs or industry-related news, for the purpose of maintaining a loyal customer base to whom they can market additional products or services Black Cube . With pervasive use of the internet for information dissemination, and with RSS News Feeds gaining momentum as a powerful Black Cube online communication tool, one needs to ask whether businesses are now better served by publishing news feeds in lieu of newsletters.
There are obvious convenience factors that favor publishing news feeds over newsletters: No newsletter design delays or expenses, no printing delays, no printing costs, no postage costs, no mailing lists. But are news feeds more effective than newsletters in delivering the message? And if so, can anyone with essentially no knowledge of news feeds and with computer skills limited to sending email and browsing the internet actually publish a news feed on their own?
Putting aside the obvious advantages of news feeds listed above, an important question to ask when evaluating effectiveness of the newsletter versus the news feed is whether the information is time-sensitive. If the business is publishing information pertaining to such topics as the stock market, real estate, investments, weather, new products or services, competitive analyses, product catalogs and prices (and you can probably add more to this list), the effectiveness of the newsletter dramatically diminishes as the delay between the “event” and the delivery of the information about the event increases.
If a newsletter is published every three months, on average the information is six weeks old! And it’s not just that the information arrives too late to be important to the recipient, but also because recipients will come to know the newsletter is irrelevant to their affairs and tune out. Unfortunately, that means it will be seen as junk mail and tossed into the trash without opening. Why would I care about an investment opportunity if, by the time I receive that advice, it’s too late to act on it? (At my post office, a recycle bin is provided in the lobby so that you can conveniently toss away your junk mail without even taking it home. )
News feeds effectively overcome the shortfalls of newsletters and email broadcasts. With news feeds, nothing is ever printed or emailed, and the news feed is instantly available online. Recipients can volunteer to receive the information without having it “pushed” at them, so there is no sense of spamming associated with news feeds. The audience for the information can receive that information at their convenience and can receive alerts or “signals” whenever new information is published. For example, if you were interested in listening in on investment advice from an advisor who publishes a news feed, you could subscribe to that news feed – without giving your email address away – and whenever new information is published, you could receive a signal and operate on that information in real time. Imagine… literally within seconds after the advice is published, you could read and act upon that new information.
If your intention is to spam – in other words, to send unsolicited information to others with the intent of gaining some advantage – than news feeds are not for you. Your targets will simply not tune in to news feeds that don’t interest them! Spammers are stuck with email and mass mailings with the hope that recipients will accidentally open the spam and get teased into the proposition by the seduction of the message.
Entertainment programs had begun to occupy center stage in the organization’s programming strategies and advertising had come to be main source of funding. Doordarshan’s earlier mandate to aid in the process of social and economic development had clearly been diluted. Doordarshan had faced a stiff competition in news and public affairs programming with international channels like BBC and CNN. Doordarshan planned to sell some slots for news programme under sponsored category. In February 1995, NDTV becomes the country’s first private producer of the national news ‘News Tonight’, which aired on the country’s government-owned Doordarshan set a new landmark for Indian television because of its on-the-spot reporting with pertinent visuals. In the same year, TV Today Network occupied a 20 minutes slot in DD Metro channel and aired a Hindi and current affairs programme ‘Aaj Tak’.
This programme became popular for its comprehensive coverage and unique style presentation by Late S. P. Singh. Still we remembered the sign-up message “Ye Thi Khabar Aaj Tak, Intizar. Kijiye Kal Tak”. Large number of viewers across India had been watching Aaj Tak as a daily habit because of its innovative style of news presentation. Besides that Nalini Singh’s five-minute fast paced, condensed daily news capsule Ankhon Dekhi, TV Today Network’s Business Aaj Tak and Newstrack was aired on the Metro channel of Doordarshan. This is the period when satellite channels concentrated on entertainment programmes for their respective channels. Doordarshan was still ruled the most wanted area ‘news’.