What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper? It could include independent journalists, bloggers, mainstream media, worker-owned media collectives, and just about anyone else who publishes online. Even podcast episodes, videos from your favorite YouTube channels, and online forum posts could slot in, too. Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience. No email notifications interrupting your peace (unless you want them), no pressure to read articles immediately. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Molly, who is a researcher, software engineer, and creator of Web3 is Going Just Great and Citation Needed, wrote that in her recent newsletter article, “Curate your own newspaper with RSS.” The article caught my attention because:
- I’m familiar with RSS.
- I have an unhappy relationship with newsletter subscriptions.
Newsletters have really taken off the past few years. It seems that the blogging impulse has reinvented itself in the form of newsletters. One factor pushing the newsletters lately is the number of journalists who have been fired or laid off or otherwise pushed away from their media jobs. A lot of those journalists have gone independent by writing and publishing their own newsletters. As just one of very many examples, there is Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who left the New York Times earlier this year and is now publishing independently.
At the peak of the blogging era, many people used Google Reader to keep up with their favorite writers. When Google killed off that product (as Google has done with so many others), it put a real damper on the whole blogging thing.
But a key piece of underlying technology, called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), lives on. RSS is a protocol for websites to announce to the world all the new stuff on the site. The whole podcast industry was enabled by and still runs using RSS.
Anyway, I find myself in a cycle of subscribing and then unsubscribing to the newsletters of journalists and other writers that I’d like to follow. I subscribe to people that I’m interested in, and then I unsubscribe because I don’t like what all the subscriptions do to my email inbox. (To my tech friends — yes, yes, I know, filters and rules and folders and all that. I just don’t like to fuss with that.)
Molly has written a detailed guide for an alternative approach that goes back to using RSS. News and other media sites, newsletter publishers, and social media platforms commonly provide RSS feeds, and there are modern, excellent feed reader apps that replace and improve upon the old Google Reader. Several of these apps are quite powerful, with features for saving, searching, and sharing all kinds of information.
I’m going to give it a fresh try, using the Inoreader app that Molly uses. There are other options, too, and Molly describes them.
If you have never used a feed reader app before, then there will be a learning curve, and it may take some time to develop your own rhythm and way of working with it. But I encourage you to go over and at least skim Molly’s article for insight, ideas, and tips.
PS. My blog posts here at https://steveeddins.com have RSS feeds, of course. Here is a description of them.