you make a good point about the quest to get “all the news that’s fit to print,” so to speak. but, realistically speaking, that’s a quixotic quest. i see RSS improvements on an asymptotal curve; RSS can–and should–definitely continue to fine tune itself, but RSS will never be perfect. that said, i feel much more informed since i started using RSS than ever before.

perhaps a way to mitigate one’s chance of missing an important story, short of governmental regulation of RSS technology, is to subscribe to a bunch of feeds from a range of news outlets. (i find the huffington post’s “raw feed” to be a good source of AP reports i don’t catch in the times.) i think this study has convinced me that RSS is an improvement on surfing (and certainly better than print reading), but it’s not the panacea for an uniformed public.

i still wonder about the claim about entertainment news, though…

My question back to you is where did you find a ‘send me everything you publish’ feed for the nytimes? Looking at their list of RSS feeds I don’t see that option… and that is one of the points that the study is making. Given so many choices, how do you know if you have picked enough feeds to get *everything*?

Jeanne

but RSS seemingly ranks stories based on when they are published, which determines when they are retrieved by the reader. i argued that, in addition to the convenience of one-stop retrieval, RSS a virtually “bias-free” way of getting the news.

but the results of this study complicate my argument. i guess i have two questions. the first regards the claim that RSS is only dependable if you read entertainment news. is the claim that entertainment news feeds are built better than news feeds, or is it making a qualified judgment that the stakes are lower if you miss an entertainment story than a hard news story? as an avid reader of hard news and entertainment (i supposed this encompasses movies, music, and art) news, i would disagree.

second, what if you subscribe to the “send me everything you publish” feed, as i do for the new york times website? does that mitigate the problems with selective retrieval? for example, i know i’ve seen AP stories in my new york times feed.

i also wonder if the retrieval has to do with the RSS reader you use, too. i recently tried out the online reader feedshow, and i found that it was actually not pulling stories into the reader that google reader was pulling in, so i switched back to google reader.

very interesting. my breathless praise of RSS has been downgraded to simple admiration!