Headline news by text
I have, of late, been thinking it would be rather wicked to get frequent text news updates by text throughout the day.
I get the CNN ‘breaking news’ emails to the Blackberry — however I’d like something like this by mobile. Crucially, however, I don’t want to pay 25p a text.
In fact, I want the headline breaking news delivered to me free.
My time and my attention is that precious that I think someone else should be paying to interupt it. Ultimately, I can and do find out what’s going on at no cost to me via CNN email updates and so on.
I fancied the idea of having Reuters news updates. I don’t need them. But you know, I was thinking of patronising them with my attention.
Reuters US will give you text message updates at standard-network-rates. Arse, I thought. Well, at least it’s not premium.
So I found the Reuters UK mobile page and was startled to find that the service is available at a whopping 25p per alert with an average of 1-3 alerts per day.
Now, when you start talking like this – ‘an average of’ — balls — if I was running the service, I’d make sure I whacked everyone on the list with three updates a day to make sure I got my 75p in revenue.
If you work on the basis of 3 alerts a day, that’s £22 a month. No deal. It was only a flight of fancy Reuters.
Surely Reuters could buy text messages at some ridiculously cheap rate and find a decent corporate sponsor to contribute a bit. I’ve no issue with the odd advert now and again, provided it’s a decent ‘corporatey’, ‘businessey’ advert such as one might see in Fortune magazine. Or maybe it could be supported by a network operator keen to market its data products to folk who’re interested in news.
Getting Reuters news updates across the day would make me feel important. It’d make me feel good. BUT it isn’t worth £22 a month to me.
My attention is worth much, much more — and I’m excited to see what happens as more and more corporations recognise this.
Meantime, BBC news on the Blackberry browser does just fine.
