I Want My Breaking News   

Some Web sites are offering news alerts to subscribers, with mixed results.

T HE NEXT TIME the FBI loses a laptop or a tech stock drops while I'm at work I'll know about it--at least one of my six breaking news services will notify me. They probably won't give me the same stories at the same time, but cumulatively I think I'm covered.
I signed up for this blitz in order to find out how major media sites handle e-mail alerts. In early July I subscribed to all of the breaking news lists that I could find at national network and newspaper sites: ABCNews.com, CNN.com, washingtonpost.com, NYTimes.com and Yahoo!News. MSNBC.com doesn't offer breaking news alerts via e-mail, so I grudgingly downloaded their News Alert application, which launches a desktop alert window when news breaks. (The installation was actually quite simple, and the service was unobtrusive.)
Why focus on breaking news? Because regularly scheduled e-newsletters such as daily headlines and programming notes are boringly reliable and almost completely automatic. Breaking news lists are interesting because they're more likely to involve editorial judgment and human error.
A typical breaking news e-mail consists of a short tease and a link to the full story. Managed properly, it's an excellent traffic- and brand-building tool.
At first I thought I was looking for technical gaffes; the whole idea originated when washingtonpost.com accidentally sent an e-mail alert announcing that Timothy McVeigh had been executed--a week after the execution.
What I found was more intriguing philosophically: a wide variation in frequency between sites. In a two-week period, Yahoo!-News sent 58 messages--an average of four a day. CNN and MSNBC put out one or two a day; ABCNews and the New York Times sent three messages each. I received nothing from washingtonpost.com.
The single event of consensus was the awarding of the 2008 Olympics to Beijing. Within an hour I received four e-mails and a News Alert about that story. But that was not the norm.
I doubt that these inconsistencies were wholly deliberate. One site sent multiple messages per day and then fell silent for a week, suggesting a technical or procedural lapse.
However, most sites seemed to have chosen a threshold for defining "breaking" news and followed it most of the time.
So how does a site decide when to send an alert, and how does it fit into the newsroom workflow? I asked Bernard Gershon, senior vice president and general manager of ABCNews. com, and Steve White, chief technology officer at MSNBC.com.
White says feedback proved that users don't want to get paged or e-mailed every time a story is updated. That's why News Alert begins with breaking news and allows subscribers to add more topics. Alerts arrive once or twice daily, reflected simultaneously on MSNBC.com.
Meanwhile, ABCNews.com sent just three messages in a two-week period.
"Our threshold for what is breaking news is relatively high, so that when people get it they will actually look at it," Gershon explains.
The dilemma is both editorial and strategic; there probably ought to be a lower bar for breaking news on the Web--and more messages might mean more clicks--but too many alerts will tire the user and undermine the concept. (My own suggestion is to compensate for frequent messages by using specific subject lines so that users can open the notes that interest them.)
Regarding workflow, both Gershon and White stress that news alerts should be integrated with the site's content so that they're a natural step in the process of posting a big story. On MSNBC's system, for example, editors know that stories marked as breaking news will get a "red flag" on the site and also trigger a News Alert.
Integration is probably the difference between the sites that cover breaking news consistently and those that don't.
It's also critical in a broader sense. E-mail newsletters were the first mode of multiplatform delivery, which has now grown to include WebTV, wireless devices and desktop applications. The challenge is to streamline the publishing process for all of these formats as delivery grows more complex. As Steve White advises, "Publish once; distribute everywhere."
But multiplatform is also about editorial philosophy and credibility. Within the technical boundaries of each medium, there's an obligation to publish news accurately and with a consistent policy that reflects the organization's standards. E-mail is just part of that policy, but it's an easy place to start.
Now, how do I unsubscribe from these things...?