The Hindustan Times has launched a business paper called Mint. They have a website too. They’ve partnered with the Wall Street Journal and in typical fashion, reading a news article requires one to register (But hey, it’s free!). Bugmenot beckons…
That apart, what’s even more surprising is the perennial problem of invalid RSS feeds seems to have hit them from day one. There are zero links in the feeds, and so, they’re obviously invalid. I had posted earlier about NDTV’s works-today-not-tomorrow feeds. Do all the sites use the same sub-standard CMS or something?
I guess nobody there cares because they don’t get too much traffic from feeds. It’s just a cool thing to have. Hopefully, it’ll change once the feeds start driving serious traffic.
Among all the MSM news websites in India, IBNLive and DNA do a very good job in my opinion. They are head and shoulders above everybody else. DNA for their well designed, simple and very functional site and IBNLive for just getting what a good news site should really be. They’re integrated very well with the television counterpart CNN-IBN and their initiatives like providing streaming video and doing simple no-brainer things like putting up transcripts of TV interviews quickly on the site shows that they “get” what a good news site should really be like. And of course, the RSS feeds have always worked 
. So, to the people working on the DNA and IBNLive websites… nice work!
Update: I had to browse IBNLive in IE recently, and boy do they have a lot of ads! Just started appreciating AdBlock Plus and the Filterset much more.
Update (7th May, 2007): Mint has opened up the site now. Registration is no longer required to read the news articles. It’s good that they have realised the futility of asking people to register just to read the news.