The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Looking at yesterday’s post, it’s clear that many Austin media outlets are embracing news feeds (RSS) as a way of distributing their stories and attracting people to their site.
After reading Suw Charman’s post, “How many news outlet staff actually read their own RSS feeds?“, I took a few minutes to look over the feeds available [...]

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Here is a list of RSS feeds currently published by Austin media outlets. Please feel free to add any I may have missed:
Austin American-Statesman
News feeds
Local News
Williamson County
Texas News
Obituaries
Business feeds
Business News
Sports
Sports (All)
Longhorns
High school sports
Associated Press Sports
Opinion
Opinion
Life
Life (All)
Books
Gardening
Jane Greig
Style
Travel
Austin360.com feeds
Entertainment (All)
Arts stories
Food
Movie reviews
Movie headlines
Music headlines
Restaurant reviews
Television
XLent headlines
Statesman.com blogs
Podcasts (Audio updates on various subjects)
Backspin (Kevin Robbins [...]

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Last summer, Austin’s public radio station KUT hired Rich Dean as the station’s director of channels and tasked him with implementing high-definition radio technology and developing content and online services for the station. Dean, a founder of NPR.org, has been working to create new content at the station and get KUT’s digitally archived programming out [...]

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The folks at the Statesman’s Austin360.com website have assembled a nice multimedia package in the wake of the death of blues club owner Clifford Antone.
The main story by Michael Corcoran is supported by a photo gallery, an audio slideshow, reader-submitted photos, audio and video clips, and a guestbook where people can leave memorial messages.
Kudos to [...]

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Following a link on Instapundit led me to author Virginia Postrel’s story about her kidney donation in the current issue of Texas Monthly. It’s a moving and admirable story, and well worth the read.
Thinking about how the story was presented online, the immediate thing I wished for was some form of interactivity - a forum, [...]

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Doc Searls has a thoughtful post about his recent interview at his local paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press. Two of the great points Doc makes (archived stories that must be paid for in order to be accessed, lost exposure and authority in search engines) can also be applied to our local paper’s website, Statesman.com.
The fees [...]

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A couple of weeks ago, the Statesman changed the nature of their RSS feeds from providing a headline and some initial wording to being headline-only. I argued at the time that feeds that show the full text of an item were the way to go.
One of the main drivers of the Statesman’s decision was the [...]

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Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith is praised by the Houston Chronicle as having “helped the 300,000-circulation magazine return to its hard-hitting yet cheeky roots and earned it a continued presence at the National Magazine Awards”.
The story covers the anxiety that some had when Smith took over six years ago - the concerns about whether a [...]

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I first heard of Rob Curley via the IT Conversations site, which collects and publishes interviews, keynote speeches and other audio programs. Rob’s keynote at the 2005 Integrated Media Association New Media Summit contained so many dead-on assessments of how to do local online journalism the right way that it made my head spin.
Since that [...]

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Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who has given mainstream media plenty of criticism over their approach to stories, passes some praise their way in a recent post. As he looked over both online and offline accounts of a recent Mavs’ playoff game, Cuban found that the local newspapers in Dallas and Fort Worth offered more [...]

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