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RSS News Feeds: The Next Cool Thing? by Joseph A. Davis
Hungry for news? Can't pay big bucks for specialized news services? If you are geeky enough, a new toy called "RSS news feeds" may be an answer.
About two years ago, EW printed "Poor Richard’s Environmental News Services: Resources for the Underfunded," which listed 10 of the best free electronic news services related to the environment. Time has moved on. Prices have risen. Quality has gotten worse or better. Technology has marched. Now there's an alternative.
RSS news feeds allows you to build your own free news service out of hundreds of specialized newswires -- one that will give you constantly updated links to much of the news that matters most to you.
The downside is that it is a do-it-yourself project (especially if you want a lot of news in custom subject areas), and that you will end up sifting through a lot of raw "ore" to find the precious nuggets. Most journalists already do this with other technologies (like reading press releases).
Many readers are already familiar with "Moreover.com" -- you can see this environmental news ticker displayed on the site of Environmental Media Services. It appears on EMS as a constantly updated and scrolling list of environmental stories from sources around the world. Some people call this scrolling format a "web log" or "blog." Each item on the list is a headline and a link to a story somewhere else, the BBC, the San Francisco Chronicle, or the New Zealand Herald, for example.
Services like Moreover.com are called "news aggregators." What you may not realize is that there are now thousands of news aggregators publishing online, and that scores of them are relevant to the environment. Each news aggregator may read hundreds of independent online news publications (e.g., the New York Times) and select content relating to a particular subject (e.g., science). This saves you a lot of reading time. Moreover.com has hundreds of subject-specific content channels. Other big ones include Newsisfree and Syndic8.
What's more, there are now free or cheap software tools that can help you sort, collect, and quickly review these news streams on an hourly basis. We use and like one called Amphetadesk, but there are others including Newsgator, FeedDemon, Radio Userland, Lockergnome, Feedreader, NetNewsWire, and NewsMonster (see links below). Some of these companies offer both news content and the software tools for reading it.
How do these companies make money, you may ask, if they are giving it away free? The answer is that customers can get more if they pay more. It often costs money if you want to republish what you are getting from news feeds as literal content on your own website or in some other way. By upgrading to premium service -- often for as little as $25 a year, or even free -- you can get extra customization of the content you receive, or the ability to look at it in archived form after its day or hour has scrolled by. But the facts of a news event and the story ideas are free.
One of the best things about RSS news feeds is that you can customize them to suit your interests. Some environmental journalists may be interested in forests and public lands and little else. Others may be interested in toxic chemicals and environmental health, but write little about forests.
Environmental RSS feeds vary in quality. They are not a "magic bullet" that will give you everything you need, but they do make a valuable contribution to a total news diet. The different feeds and the sources they collect may all have their own biases. While they do help you cast a wider net, even a large collection of feeds will still not catch many major environmental stories.
Try not to be intimidated by the techno-slang and acronyms. RSS stands for "Rich Site Summary," although some insist that it stands for "Really Simple Syndication." But be warned, "syndication" in this world, a realm often called "blogistan", does not mean quite what it means to traditional newsfolk.
The best way to get started, for our money (free), is to go to http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/ and follow the directions for installing Amphetadesk. There are competing products, some possibly better, but this one works, is widely compatible and user-friendly, and offers a choice among some 5,000 feeds right off the bat. Or try another good one, FeedDemon at http://www.feeddemon.com/feeddemon/index.asp.
But wait, there's more. If you are in the publishing business, you might consider using an RSS feed as another way of getting your stuff to the world. For big or established media, it may be as handy as an auxiliary channel that will increase your total coverage. For small-fry media or freelancers, it is another way of getting into publishing with a low cost-of-entry. It conjures up the freelancer's dream of syndicating your own column. As always, in the end, the crucial element is a good business model. You can find an RSS primer for publishers and writers at http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/.
Web guru Amy Gahran and Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing even suggest it may be time to declare the death of e-mail publishing (ruined by spam and viruses) and the rise of RSS as its successor.
Listed below are some of the best, or most prolific, environment-related news feeds we have found so far. Finding them is hard work -- involving lots of trolling with lots of search engines on lots of search terms. We urge readers to send others they know of to joedavis@environmentwriter.org.
Note: These URLs must be plugged into news reading software.
General Environment
Science and Health
Industry-Specific
Public Health
News Readers (Browsable Web addresses)
November 9, 2003
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