Misconception About Widespead RSS Use By Traditional Online Publishers

Earleir this month, Rich Skrenta of Topix.net wrote about the misconception about how widespead RSS syndication is among traditional online publishers.

“Only 7% of the sources Topix.net crawls have XML feeds. I’d estimate that only a few hundreds of the top 3,000 newspapers we crawl have RSS support. The rest we obtain with a news crawler which is good about finding articles on news sites, leaving behind the ads and navigation sidebars. It’s low maintenance so we don’t have to change anything everytime a site redesigns its html.

“Even for sites which offer feeds, we’ll generally continue to crawl the human-readable version. We’ve seen sites where the RSS broke but no one at the paper seemed to notice, or cases where the RSS was out of sync with the human-viewable web content. By crawling both we get full coverage of the content available.

“There are approximately 1,400 weekly newspapers in the US, and over 2,600 weeklies. There are around 3,000 magazines, and thousands of radio and TV station websites. Not to mention the city government websites we crawl looking for local announcements.

“Despite the enthusiasm around RSS, there is a long way to go before the bulk of this content will be available in feeds.”

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.