State Impact Indiana has been a good resource for Indiana education news since 2011. It has announced that it will stop updating its website in favor of having its stories more diffusely spread through NPR and PBS affiliates:
That change has prompted changes with StateImpact. There are no plans to update the project’s website, indianapublicmedia.org/stateimpact. That’s because local NPR and PBS station partners’ websites are home to stories from the Indiana Public Broadcasting team. These in-depth stories will be available on StateImpact’s social media accounts.
That’s a little disappointing. I have StateImpact in my Feedly newsreader. So, when they post a new story, I’d have it there waiting for me when I checked my news feed. I guess I can add a few more NPR and/or PBS sites to my reader — assuming they have RSS feeds. But, I’m afraid those stories will be mixed in with Trump’s outrage of the hour or whatever the hot issue of the day might be. I can also follow the social media feeds, but there I’m at the mercy of Twitter or Facebook’s algorithms. (You don’t have a social media account so much as Twitter or Facebook has an account that you write content for.)
More generally, I’ve been hoping for a return to the use of RSS feeds, the open web, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if this is like hoping for a return to a simpler time when everyone wore hats or a realistic anticipation that people will get sick of social media antics.
It still surprises me when an organization goes from “here’s a clear, comprehensive and centralized way to follow our activities” to “hey, hope you find us on Facebook some time!” It would almost be easier on them to maintain the site and then automatically push content out to different distribution channels from there.
Anyway, nice hat, I’ll keep wearing mine if you keep wearing yours.
From “The Meaning of Life”: