In addition to the usual reading list I give to students on the new MA Online Journalism, I also provide an OPML file of around 50 RSS feeds they should be subscribing to – broadly, 5 feeds each in 10 categories.
I thought I should make it available here, so: here it is.
The idea is that a) they get instant access to up-to-date news and analysis of a range of relevant areas; and b) it introduces them to the concept of RSS, if they don’t already know about it, and how to share OPML files.
It seems a no-brainer that we should be doing this on all courses.
Oh, and if you think there are better feeds, let me know.
Here’s a very useful tool if you come across an article that gives you a whole bunch of RSS feeds you’d like to subscribe to – or, indeed, if you’re writing such a post yourself. [Read more]
There’s a great list of RSS feeds for infographics news over at Nicholas Rapp’s blog, which I’ve belatedly discovered. It’s thoroughly recommended – but copying and pasting them all into your reader is a bit of a chore – so I’ve created an OPML file of them all which you can import in one graceful motion.
3 weeks ago my class of online journalism students were introduced to the website they were going to be working on: BirminghamRecycled.co.uk – environmental news for Birmingham and the West Midlands.
The site has been built by final year journalism degree student Kasper Sorensen, who studied the online journalism module last year.
In building and running the service Kasper has done a number of clever, networked things I thought I should highlight. They include:
Creating a Delicious network for the site – every journalist in the team has a Delicious account; this gathers together all of the useful webpages that journalists are bookmarking
Kasper sent the whole team an OPML file of subscriptions to RSS feeds of searches for every Midlands area and environmentally related keywords. In other words, journalists could import this into their Google Reader and at a stroke be monitoring any mention of certain key words (e.g. ‘pollution’, ‘recycling’) in Birmingham areas.
The About page has a list of all contributing journalists with individual RSS feeds.
In addition, each author has a link to their own profile page which not only displays their articles but pulls Twitter tweets, Delicious bookmarks and blog posts.
Kasper wanted to explicitly follow a Mashable-style model rather than a traditional news service: he felt an overly formal appearance would undermine his attempts to build a community around the site.
And community is key. When unveiling the site to the journalists Kasper made the following presentation – a wonderful distillation of how journalists need to approach news in a networked world:
This year’s reading list – an OPML file
