Newspapers 2.0: RSS features on British newspaper sites

One of the areas I was looking at in my survey of "Web 2.0" features across British newspaper websites was the RSS options offered by the sites.

I though it would be useful to put down in tabular form a comparison between the features available on each site.

The first table looks at how the feeds are formatted and promoted, and how easy they are made to use.

I must note that although I've listed a number of feeds per paper, I know that in a couple of cases this is not strictly accurate, since the newspapers do not themselves provide a complete overview. Rather than spend ages digging around for an exact number, I've based the count in this table on the number of feeds that the papers themselves present to the public on their "What is RSS?" or "RSS Help" pages.

For me the most interesting things to come out of that table are that all of the newspapers now offer RSS feeds, which was not the case maybe two years ago. It is also true that all of the newspapers only offer summary feeds. Nobody has yet taken the plunge to make all of their main news and editorial content available in the mostly advertising-unfriendly RSS format.

I must confess that I was surprised at how few newspapers offered a contextual feed on individual story pages. Only the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror seemed to tailor the RSS link provided on a page to the content of that page. Given that the majority of the sites surveyed have different templates for the different sections of their site, providing an appropriate RSS link does not seem to be a great leap.

I included the personalised search RSS feed in the table just to emphasise that no newspaper is currently doing it. Custom RSS feeds for specific search terms of course require infrastructure investment, but it seems to me they have a great potential in attracting subscribers to click-through to content they are specifically interested in, even if they would not generally read a particular newspaper.

The next table looks at which newspapers provide easy subscription buttons for their users to third party feed-reading software. The number of red crosses in the table indicates that this is not widespread.

The Daily Mail dominates that table thanks to the fact that they are using FeedBurner to distribute their RSS feeds. That means the XML comes equipped with a stylesheet that automatically includes an ever-growing list of links to RSS subscription services.

Of the newspapers that include subscription widgets, it should be noted that only The Guardian and The Telegraph have them embedded in their own pages. The other papers that feature them do so courtesy of the third party re-packaging their content as feeds.

It is also interesting to note that whilst The Sun and The Mirror both share Mediafed as the company publishing their RSS feed, they have a different approach to incorporating third-party subscription buttons. Either The Sun has opted out, or The Mirror has specifically opted in, to Mediafed's provision of buttons.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be looking at newspaper RSS feeds in more detail, which will include an analysis of some statistics around subscription numbers. I'll also be publishing some OPML files listing RSS feeds from newspapers, something which they sadly don't provide themselves.