Campaign urges BBC News to release full text RSS feeds

A campaign for the BBC to provide full text RSS feeds for its news channel has been launched with a petition submitted to Downing Street.

The BBCFree initiative is calling on the corporation to include complete news articles in its feeds, which currently only feature a single sentence.

Founders Peter Clark and Lee Mallabone, who are also creators of 'intelligent newspaper' Broadersheet, hope the campaign will spread via Twitter and social networking and bookmarking sites, in addition to the government petition, according to a statement on their website.

"BBC news is awesome and deserves to be shared and consumed however the readers desire. Be that bespoke iPhone applications, in news aggregators or websites. This currently isn't possible," the campaign's statement said.

"Having the full news content in machine readable format opens the door for millions of exciting mashups."

The argument that full text RSS feeds will drive traffic away from a news organisation's website and therefore detract from potential online revenues does not apply to the BBC News site as it does not include adverts, Peter Clark told Journalism.co.uk.

Last year the Guardian updated its RSS feeds to 'full-fat'. Speaking to Journalism.co.uk, Matt McAlister, head of the Guardian's Developer Network, said: "We want to make the Guardian more useful to people in whatever context they are in, no matter where they are online, we want the Guardian to be useful for them.

"RSS is a great vehicle for making that work and it makes sense to try and fully engage them in that experience, rather than trying to drive them back to your website."

UPDATE (06/07/2009): According to a BBC spokesman: "We do not make full text versions of our stories available in RSS form due to rights reasons as we use a variety of different news sources in the creation of BBC News stories. We do make our headlines and summaries available in line with the industry norm."

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