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 from Austin media outlets and see which ones stood out.
The best feeds come from two of the local television outlets: KXAN (Channel 36) and KEYE (Channel 42). News feeds from each station contain headlines and a one-sentence description, while their RSS feeds for blogs contain either the full text of each item (KXAN) or a lengthy abstract (KEYE).
The next most well-formed feeds were the podcast feeds from KUT, KVRX, and Texas Monthly. All were in good shape, with a text description of each item along with the audio file.
All feeds from the Statesman and Austin360 contain headlines only; no abstracts or full-text. I’ve covered that ground before: I understand if they don’t want to give away their stories for free, but believe that a one- or two-sentence summary would increase interest and click-through rates. The feeds from KVUE (Channel 24) are also headline-only.
Finally, I wasn’t able to find any news feeds via RSS from the Austin Chronicle or KTBC (Channel 7).
I tend to think of the print media outlets being farther ahead in the RSS games than others, so it was a bit surprising to see Statesman and Chronicle as trailing behind in this area.
1 response so far ↓
1 Rob // Jun 1, 2006 at 10:20 am
I find the Chronicle trails in all things online. I have tried for years to get their weekly e-mail but it has never worked. They don’t have blogs, the website is very hard to navigate, and their RSS feeds are non-existent as you mentioned. Pretty sad. For a top-notch organization check out the Dallas Observer.
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