Online Journalism News

How to: Get to grips with RSS in three minutes

We publish nine RSS feeds:

News
Jobs
Press releases
Awards
Events
Short courses
Smart Moves - media appointments
Best of the journalism blogs
Editors' pick of the news

So what is this RSS thing anyway?

RSS is a simple tool that delivers news directly to you as soon as it is published online.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.

It means you can receive new stories and headlines instantly, rather than having to look for the latest updates online. RSS also makes it much easier to browse headlines from lots of different sites in one place.

If you have a little technological knowledge, you can also add our headlines and/or job listings to your web site or blog. But don't worry if you don't know how to do this with an XML feed, we offer a much easier way of doing this by simply placing a short piece of Javascript code in your page templates. Click here to find out how.

Why should I bother?
This is an invaluable tool for journalists. News from a wide range of sources can be monitored much more efficiently and it is easier to keep up with breaking stories.

Most major news sites, blogs and even some PR services now offer RSS feeds.

How do I get started?

Step 1 - set up a news reader program. You'll use this to subscribe to and read headline feeds from your favourite sites.

You can use a special desktop program, a web-based service or a recent version of a web browser as your news reader.

Step 2 - sign up to RSS feeds from your favourite sites

Once you've got a news reader, you can look for the orange RSS logo on your favourite sites and follow the instructions to add the feed to your news reader.

It's that simple!

Now even simpler!

You can now get all our feeds in a single ready-to-use widget that will display them on your Mac or PC desktop, or across a range of blogging and social networking platforms. Click here to download the widget now.

Tags (click tag to find related articles; click icon for feed):
rss | feeds | how tos | syndication |

Sign up here for our free, daily email newsletter to get all the latest stories, jobs, tips and more.

Got a story? Email our news team: Laura Oliver; Judith Townend or telephone +44 (0)1273 384290. You can also follow us on Twitter: @journalismnews / @LauraOliver / @JTownend.