Online Journalism News

Tech tip: Google news in an RSS feed

Journalists who use Google News frequently are probably already aware that you can sign up for free email news alerts using key words relating to your specialist area. Unfortunately handling the subsequent volume of email can be a bit of a chore.

An easier way to handle news sources is to use an RSS reader, which many journalists now use to aggregate stories directly from their sources (ie BBC, Guardian etc). It's much quicker to scan through headlines and summaries and frees up your email program for its intended purpose as a communication tool.

This is already possible with Yahoo's news aggregator. Simply enter the keywords or phrases relating to your subject area and then locate the XML logo at the bottom of the right-hand column on the search results page. Click on the logo to get your feed link.

For example, a search for "online journalism" creates an XML link of http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=online journalism&ei=UTF-8&fl=0. If you are comfortable with the syntax, you could even edit the URL string yourself to get the results you want.

Unfortunately, Google News does not yet offer RSS feeds. But if you have access to a webserver, there is a very simple PHP script that you can install that will create an RSS feed for you.

The software is called Grouper and the basic version is free and all you need to create a Google News RSS feed.

There are comprehensive instructions on Grouper's web site and in the download package so it should only take you a few minutes to get up and running.

More information:
BBC guide to RSS

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