Newspapers Try 'Really Simple Syndication'

By: Carl Sullivan The latest hot tool for online publishers is the RSS headline feed. Short for Rich Site Summary (and sometimes called "Really Simple Syndication"), RSS allows Web sites and individual users to subscribe to headline feeds from news sites, with links to the complete stories.

The feeds can be read on special software called news aggregators or on Web sites such as Bloglines.com. RSS is getting a boost from the popularity -- even on newspaper sites -- of blogging, or Web logging. Many bloggers, who write online journals that typically link to other Web sites, use RSS because it's an easy way to aggregate headlines from a large number of sources.

One of the newest RSS offerings is from The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H., where nh.com Editor Ernesto Burden's team built a feed for the latest presidential primary news. The Christian Science Monitor offers the entire paper in this format and also lets users subscribe to specific sections such as world coverage or arts, says Joel Abrams, partnership development specialist for csmonitor.com. While the site has no way of tracking individual RSS users, it serves over a million RSS files per month.

"We're pleased with the numbers," Abrams said. "It was an easy thing to [set up] and a way to attract readers to our site without spending any money."

The New York Times launched its first RSS in March 2002. "Web logs are an important distribution channel for our high-quality content, and providing RSS feeds generates both traffic and user registrations for nytimes.com," said Christine Mohan, spokeswoman for New York Times Digital. The paper currently offers 19 feeds to bloggers using Radio Userland software.

"We are watching RSS very closely," Mohan said. "It's still fairly nascent and is only applicable for small portions of our user base right now, but this base will undoubtedly grow as Web logs become more popular." Indeed, more and more newspaper sites have their own in-house blogmeisters.

Abrams thinks the aggregation aspect will draw more users. "It saves them time because they don't have to go from one Web site to another," he said. "If you read a lot of Web sites, this is a way to see all the headlines in one place."

As with other Net technologies, there isn't yet an obvious business model here. "I think it's better to have people read your content than not," Abrams said. "It's a challenge monetizing it." The Monitor is now exploring the idea of placing ads in RSS.