Gregory's ServerEvery newsroom that publishes on the web should have an RSS feed. It's quick and cheap to support, and not doing it is reader-hostile. https://werd.io/2023/every-news-publisher-should-support-rss
Ben Werdmuller
8 comments
Larry Felton Johnson
@ben ... with a little tweaking, our articles go out to Facebook, Mastodon, Twitter and even some of them (based on category feeds) to Tumblr.
Larry Felton Johnson
@mauricerenck @ben It depends on the tools used for scheduling, but I use dlvr.it to schedule for social media, and mailerlite for newsletter. Both play well with RSS. dlvr.it isn't very user-friendly, but once I beat my head against the wall with their terrible documentation, it was easy to set up RSS feeds to distribute to social media by pulling the info from RSS feed, including from different Wordpress categories on our site. 
Micah
@ben I agree with you that RSS feed support would be very welcome. That said, let's say you're talking to someone at a major news outlet. They raise a point about tracking engagement. They raise another point about revenue incentives. They raise another point about syndication control, their archive model, and the disruption to their business model. I've heard all of these at various times from various stakeholders. It's case by case, obviously, but hard to provide answers for everything
Ben Werdmuller
@asuh Yep. I've had those conversations too, some of them very recently. But, of course, one could easily have them about the web itself, too. There's nothing to stop people from *also* having newsletters, etc. And it's perfectly possible to have analytics on a feed. A full-text feed does contradict paywall models, but then, a summary feed could even be an incentive to sign up. |
@ben Not only is it good for readers who directly access the RSS feed, it's good for pushing out to social media. We have a feed that sends out every article on a schedule, plus it's used to assemble the article list for our newsletter. Far from being obsolete, RSS is a powerful tool.