"Granted AFP is not a newspaper"
Ding ding ding. Newspapers, shaky though their business model is, make money from advertising, and only indirectly from the actual news. News wires, on the other hand, make all their money from the news itself.<p>If Bloomberg had ever been insane enough to provide live data over RSS, would it also be a "step backward" for them to come to their senses?
RSS is just one of those things where no media person thinking in a pre-internet world will ever understand; giving your content away, with few ways of monetizing the readers?! Preposterous!