Friday, July 15, 2005

Hometown News Being Fed Nationwide Daily newspapers in most of the places I've lived or worked have all jumped on the RSS bandwagon, including my former employer, "the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper," the Hartford Courant, as well as the Raleigh News & Observer, the Boston Globe -- and now my "current" local, the Knoxville News Sentinel. (RSS or "Really Simple Syndication" means I can subscribe to an automatic feed of the paper's headlines. Here's my verbose old RSS background page, but these days each paper provides its own brief explanation. See the pages linked to the publication names.) Here's an interesting twist for serious news-addicts or RSS evangelists: Those four papers just happen to be owned by different media conglomerates. Providing a new service like RSS may depend on corporate-level approval or multi-publication software decisions. I suspect that means there's a good chance RSS soon will be available throughout those chains. I only tested that theory at one or two other papers at each chain. So far I'm finding the tell-tale orange XML or RSS icons almost everywhere. If you want to continue the experiment, visit the corporate websites in the middle of the following lines, and try some of the other member papers and broadcasters. I've added a link to the RSS page for one more paper in each chain; in some cases even the wording of the RSS info pages is similar: The Hartford Courant --[ Tribune Company ]-- Newsday The News Sentinel --[ Scripps ]-- Commercial Appeal The News & Observer --[ McClatchy ]-- Sacramento Bee Boston Globe --[ NY Times Co. ]-- The New York Times Keeping to my "hometown newspaper" theme -- I haven't lived in a town with a Gannett paper since the demise of the Hartford Times in the 1970s, but Gannett's flagship paper, USA Today, has been into RSS for a while, as are Gannett-owned WBIR-TV in Knoxville and the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle. I didn't see feeds at Gannett's Nashville Tennessean or The Daily News Journal in Murfreesboro, but maybe I missed them. (It is possible to get unofficial feeds through other sources, such as the Tennessean headlines from MyRSS.com or city-specific feeds from Topix.net.) The News Sentinel appears to be the most recent adopter, with a nice variety of feeds, including its blogs, columnists, section pages, and a few sports-related feeds marked "accessible only by paid GoVolsXtra subscribers." The site's RSS page cautions users that, "We're still working with our RSS feeds and you may encounter some problems." (You'll see similar wording at its Memphis sister paper.) I was able to subscribe to the KnoxNews feeds with only a few glitches, mostly stray text coding like "SPAN CLASS" showing up in a couple of story summaries. Also, I'm not sure the main "news" feed is supposed to supply a whole week's worth of stories -- 263 of them, to be exact. But I'll ask. Either way, using RSS it's a much faster way to browse the days news than waiting for the KnoxNews.com front page graphics to load over a modem connection, although even that's a little speedier than it was last month. Maybe the site redesign wasn't a conspiracy to sell me the print edition after all. 3:22:44 PM

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