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"Really Simple Syndication” isn’t that simple...

If you think RSS feeds are giving you the same stories that you can find on a news site, think again.

International News and Problems with the News Media’s RSS Feeds

Main Results

Study Conclusions

Understanding Results

What is RSS?

Study Methodology

Authors

Reliability: Do RSS search results match website's search results?

Inclusiveness: Does RSS offer non-staff & archived stories (if also come through website search)?

Key info: Does RSS give headline/summary, date, time, reporter?

Timeliness: Are RSS stories as timely as those from website search?

	Overall Score	Reliability	Inclusiveness	Key Info	Timeliness
3. ITN	2.75

THE HEADLINES: Two RSS feeds were searched through the Yahoo! Pipes software: Index and World. On average, the two RSS feeds returned almost all of “today’s” stories that came up on ITN’s website, but even though the results were the same, very few stories came through—if any—on all searches.
Other Issues:
	Neither the website nor the two RSS feeds for ITN ever posted stories that were not staff written.
	The website did not bring up archived stories that went back more than a month, because the coders specified what date to search for. The RSS feeds did pull up archived stories occasionally, but generally from the previous week.
	The RSS feeds were timely in their delivery of stories, but the time difference between London and Washington often resulted in the feeds returning future-dated stories if the search was conducted at night.
	Search results for the RSS feeds gave the articles’ headlines and short summaries, but other information was only available after clicking through to the full article. An overview of date, time, author and summary would have been more useful and informative. The website searches returned the stories’ headlines/summaries and the date. The website search returned the time, the date and headline/summary of the articles.
	The RSS feeds were consistent in what they pulled from the website. When 10-12 consecutive searches were run through the feeds, the results remained the same.
(Nicole Alberico and Carrie Peirce)

About ITN

Circulation/Audience

Not Available

Online Access

No log-in needed.

Parent Company

ITV http://www.itv.com/

Other Relevant Ownership and Interests

Not Applicable

Parent Company Revenue

£364 million for 2006

A center of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy. Copyright © 2006 International Center for Media and the Public Agenda. 1117 Journalism Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742