Wilson Lau New Media

Just imagine life before RSS -  sipping a cup of tea or coffee in the early morning, you - the infowarrior - are sorting through a dozen newspapers on the breakfast table, while CNN or BBC is blaring through the speakers of your TV set. These days with RSS - your personal newsreader assistant who never complains and does not have “moods” - all the latest news items from the news publications and channels you trust the most are neatly organised in various folders waiting for you. Not just in the morning but practically round the clock. All you need to do is to log on to your personal news page. I am not the infowarrior as described by J.D. Lasica, but I certainly appreciate the efficiency and focus that RSS has brought to our life.

It is more efficient to look at news items in the newsreader as I do not need to navigate through the various sections of the a news organization’s site to get to what I want. The newsreader gives me immediate access to piece of news I am interested in learning more about. In some web sites, an advertisement page will appear when you click a news item (NY Times site does this), you are required to click an icon on the advertisement page to go to the page of the news item. News feeds do not play this sort of trick on you. I can also tag the news items for future reference.  

Although it was introduced in 1999, some news organizations have yet to adopt the technology. For example I wanted to subscribe to the feeds from China Daily for some business news, but it does not offer any feed for the moment. The four sites recommended by Rebecca have varying degrees of RSS utilisation.  

BBC’s News Feeds - to encourage users to make use of its news feeds function, the homepage of BBC’s site has in its centre the RSS icon. Just click About News Feeds and the users can subscribe to feeds in various sections. However, it only offers RSS format. From this site, I have selected the Front Page News. In its Feed Factory site, users can subscribe to news feeds of published articles as well as video clips. I like the cheerful design of this page, which reminds me of some kindergarten picture books. It makes it look like it is really easy to get feeds. I have noticed that there is no link connecting the homepage of BBC to its Feed Factory site, which seems to be an oversight.

In the New York Times’ site, the RSS icon can be found at the bottom of the page. The site divides its news feeds in two broad categories: news and features and then further breaks them down into sub-categories by alphabetical order. It is very clear.  

 The Standard in Hong Kong has its simple RSS page that offers news items as soon as they have been uploaded to the site. I believe the web team should refine this page by categorising the news items. Standard’s news feeds have not taken full advantage of RSS - they do not feed the subscribers with specific categories of news items, though the feeds arrive at their readers at realtime.

South China Morning Post only offers RSS in Podcast and I think it has lagged behind other English-language news organisations like The Standard in Hong Kong and The Nation in the region.     

Feeds are like professional newsclipping services that are free-of-charge. In addition to reports from established news organisations, we can get information from bloggers. It complements search engines like google by delivering the information we want to us directly and as soon as it becomes available.

I think that feeds - or the provision of feeds by organisations and their use by readers/ subscribers - might push the race of breaking news to an even higher level. The news organisations will become even keener in beating one and another in breaking news because feeds are as much about efficiency as they are about convenience. Headlines will become even more important because they are the first element that competes for user’s attention among hundreds of other items in the newsreader. But at the end of the day journalistic values will remain the same despite technological innovations.

By the way, I have also explored some other news organisations’ websites and subscribed to some of their news feeds.

International Herald Tribune’s site draws users’ attention to its RSS by putting it in its banner on the top of the homepage. Users can choose from RSS or Atom feed formats. IHT also recomends four news feed readers. I have picked the business news section feed.

At CNN.com - the impression its gives to me is that the site’s emphasis is on videos. I have had to scroll down to the bottom of the homepage to find the RSS. I have subscribed to the technology and business news feeds.

At nationmultimedia.com, site of the independent English-language newspaper in Bangkok The Nation, the RSS icons are at the lower left-hand corners of major section boxes. In addition, it has a dedicated RSS feed page. I have subscribed to the headline news feed.