All News, All the Time

By Alan

More and more, people are either supplementing their news gathering from both TV and newspaper by reading articles and headlines on the Internet.

The New York Times recently published results from a study that showed more people are checking the Internet as part of their morning routine. Breakfast Can Wait. The Day’s First Stop Is Online. It's quite apropos that the Times was writing that story, since they have quite a transition with their newspaper changing from traditional physical paper to online content.

However, going online for news doesn't always mean that people are getting their news from traditional journalistic sources. Many of those surveyed are checking with email, Facebook statuses of their friends, checking Twitter for the latest microblog comments, as well as browsing web news articles from traditional news organizations and non-traditional news sources like blogs.

However, as more and more news sources become part of the routine, it becomes more difficult to keep track of all the "news" that we are interested in. In fact, there are pervasive feelings that we can't "keep up" with the news. Too many things are happening to read about all of them. The days of knowing everything that needs to be known by reading the Times front-to-back are long gone.

So, there are some things we can do to try to increase the rate in which we read articles, improve the relevance of the articles that we choose to read, improve the quality of the sources we ready, and change the way we feel about how much we read.

Feelings

Let's start with the feelings. You can't keep up with everything like you used to. Let's say it together:

"I can't read about everything. I can't even read all the headlines. I'll be lucky to know about the most important topics of the day. I can't drink the entire the river of headlines, I can only dip in the flow and let the rest just escape and go on by."

Relevance

While software and programmers are trying to find ways to match the interests of the readers with the topics available, there is still room for much improvement. Keywords and topics can only be as good as the tags or categories that label them. Those tags are usually put in place by humans. When search engines, and news systems are automatically tagged, you can sometimes get poor results.

It's been fun to see how Microsoft has finally gotten it together for advertising, and they have a great representation of how irrelevant search topics can interfere with good news gathering experiences. Here's one of the Bing commercials that exemplifies that.

Most high volume news consumers are quick to point out that the best method for relevance is to get news from sources you trust. If you find a blogger that gives you information you like, follow that blog. If you have online newspaper columns that suit what you read, check with them. Find out what your friends follow, and check out those sources.

Improve the Quality

Some followers spend a short time each week looking at totally new news sources. Serendipity is the phenomenon when you stumble across something useful while looking for something else. Well rounded, well informed individuals follow wide ranging sources. Narrow bias of news will result in biased perceptions.

Here's the important part. Weed out what you don't want to follow. If you get too much news that is worthless, stop checking with that source. Spam news, funny cat videos, and Hollywood gossip news are sure ways to eat up precious online news minutes, and reduce your quality of news reading. If you improve the content, then you have less to read. But, let's finally figure out how to choose what to skim, and what to read.

Newsreaders

Years ago, the only way to read articles was to visit the website, and read the articles in the format and order that the publisher wanted you to read them. This worked if you were going to read everything that publisher wrote, in the order they wanted you to read it, and with the importance associated with it that they dictated.

Along came RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. This was a standard method for showing summaries of articles available on the site. Since it is an independent standard, all the news organizations, blogs, and sources usually provide these RSS feeds (often noted by the symbol ""). In fact, the standard of RSS has allowed for a very broad definition of "articles" to include TV episodes, podcasts, and even published songs. Apple's iTunes store uses RSS for podcasts. Hulu, Netflix, and Internet Movie Database all use RSS to publish about new content. The RSS standard essentially allows you to have an item, a date associated with it, a summary (if any), and a link to the full content (along with lots of other optional bits of interesting and searchable information).

There are a number of client applications that will consume RSS feeds. A number of other applications help with RSS reading: FeedDaemon/Newsgator, Sharpreader, Bloglines, and others.

Interestingly now, most modern browsers support RSS. Internet Explorer 7 introduced RSS support, Microsoft Outlook supports RSS feed and articles so they look like  email messages. Firefox has had RSS feed reader capabilities from the first public release. Apple's Safari supports RSS bookmarks, as well as Google's Chrome (using add-ins called "bookmarklets").

However, Google expects most users to read RSS feeds through their application called Google Reader, a dedicated RSS newsreader. The ability to provide searches among current and previously read articles, to sort by simple date or by source is typical, but Google Reader will also do an "auto sort" which figures that sources that publish less often should get pushed up to the top of the list, even if there are older topics from other blogs.

It's difficult to explain the experience of a newsreader to someone who has never used them, but for someone who wants to keep up, and to keep up to date, a newsreader (with the proper sources selected, properly skimmed, and large topics never covered), can really help someone have the equivalent of reading the Times from cover to cover.