How to read all the national newspapers using RSS
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 22 June 2007 at 10:16
Tags: Journalism, RSS
Like most journalists, I find a pile of national newspapers waiting for me when I get to work in the morning. The idea is to find useful story leads and get to work with a pair of scissors. Surely there’s a better way to the cutting online?
Martin Belam, who has been researching the national newspaper websites on his blog Currybetdotnet(and recently wrote a piece for Press Gazette how to produce good website RSS feeds) has provided an enormous public service for news junkies everywhere by creating an OPML file of all 348 national newspaper RSS feeds.
Using this file, it’s possible to get through a very good chunk of a morning cuttings routine from the comfort of your RSS newsreader. I use NetNewsWire for Macintosh, so that’s what you’ll see in the screenshots below, but in principle you should be able to do this in any newsreading software. Hopefully commenters will suggest ways of improving on this method.
Step 1: Go to Martin Belham’s site and download the OPML file. Import the file into your RSS reader:
Step 2: In your RSS newsreader, create a new folder or group of feeds called “National Newspapers” (or whatever less obvious name you prefer) and import the OPML file into this folder. Because it’s so large, this may take a while. Once it’s done, your new folder should be populated with sub-directories for each of the newspapers’s RSS feeds:
Step 3: Once it’s finished importing the feeds, click on the directory and refresh the feeds. This will definitely take a few moments. Now you can browse your feeds to find the articles you want to read.
Optional Step 4: When I tried it this morning, I ended up with 6,127 stories to read. Clearly that’s impossible to skim through systematically. This is where advanced RSS tools become crucial. Many RSS readers, including Netnewswire, have some sort of keyword filtering or smart-folder search facility. Set up filters to help you find the stories about the topics that interest you most. If, for example, you want to follow the situation in Afghanistan, you might create a filter that pulls out all the stories mentioning the word “Afghanistan”.
Now I’m left with the 19 unread stories from across the papers that mention Afghanistan in their headline or RSS summary — and that’s a much more manageable reading list:
Hopefully, that’s helpful starting point to those still puzzling over RSS. If you have any suggestions for improving upon this method, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Tags: Journalism, RSS
