RSS news consumption
I never liked the Tagesschau, Germany's most favorite and most respected prime time TV news source. I grew up with Tagesschau. To this date, life in Germany stalls at around 8 PM so people can watch the 15 minute long broadcast of what correspondences at state-owned ARD think is newsworthy events. To me, Tagesschau's format is boring, in many cases not relevant, and simply oldfashioned.
My personal favorites are news stations such as CNN, BBC News, Euronews, n-tv and n24, giving you an (almost) around-the-clock update of what is happening in this country and on this planet.
For quite some time, my favorite online news source for current events has been n-tv.de, a site I used to visit several times a day. But over the past weeks, something has changed.
I subscribed to the news feed offered by the Tagesschau tech team which does a very fine job of keeping me informed of what is going on throughout the day. My frequent daily visits to n-tv.de dropped to a few visits a week. A couple of months ago, if someone would have asked me: Could you live without n-tv.de? my answer would have been: No way. Well, it looks like things have changed for me.
To the Tagesschau team: well done! Now if your feed would only show a bit more summary information in addition to the headlines, I would be a happy man.
And this is to everyone at n-tv.de: Have a look at what NewsIsFree is already doing for you, and think of ways to improve it. Check out the BBC's RSS feeds. I know you can do it, too, if you only wanted to. And get rid off those pesky pop-ups at your web site while you're at it.
Just a small side note -- I'm not quite happy with the adjective used for the ARD: The German state does not own the ARD (or rather: the radio and TV corporations within the ARD). The ARD corporations are not privately held, still that does not make public service broadcasting "state-owned". The reason I fuss about it: Sometimes in discussions about different media systems, people actually believe that public service stations are somehow the voice of the government. (That makes it hard to understand the BBC row with Blair.) I happily agree with the accolades for Tagesschau.de's RSS feeds.
Well, ok, the ARD is a consortium baring legal capacity of public broadcasting service organisations from the various German federal states. And by state-owned I did not want to imply "voice of the Government" which is certainly not the case. "State-owned" is probably more my personal perception than fact. So thanks for pointing that out.
the folks at the tagesschau dont seem to be too fond of their rss feed, themselves ;) http://www.roell.net/weblog/newsfeed/2003/08/14.shtml#003044
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