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Times Online joins the feeding frenzy

Posted: 31/05/05 By: Jemima Kiss
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Times Online has become the latest national UK newspaper site to launch an RSS service, joining the Guardian, Daily Mail and Financial Times to offer a free news feed for readers.

The Times site today introduced four feeds covering Britain, world, sport and business news, each offering 20 stories per day. More specialist news feeds will be introduced according to demand.

"We will try to educate users who are unfamiliar with RSS - show them various feed readers and reasons why they may wish to take it up," said Peter Bale, editorial director for Times Online.

"Readers who are already familiar with RSS will relish having top quality content from the Times, the Sunday Times and Times Online."

Times Online is the first News International site to offer free RSS feeds for readers. The service has been carefully structured so as not to undermine the Times' commercial syndication services.

Recent figures released by the New York Times showed the site reported a record 555 million page views in March 2005 - 5.9 million of which were generated by the site's RSS feeds.

These kind of impressive statistics are evidence of the success of RSS, said Mr Bale.

"Whether RSS itself is a fad, I don't know, but the method of delivery is too good not to last and to grow," he told dotJournalism.

"Like blogs, we are all still working out what works best for us and for readers. We should try to offer our news and comment in whatever way people want to receive it - and that might mean podcasts or audio in the future.

"The message is more important than the medium."

• RSS is a simple string of text headlines. Web users can use a desktop or web-based program to sign up for feeds from their favourite sites, and these are automatically updated as new stories are published.

RSS is a valuable tool for journalists as it allows content from a large number of sites to be scanned quickly and efficiently in one place. Many news sites and blogs offer news feeds - see the BBC's guide to getting started with RSS.

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