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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. USA Today	2.75

THE HEADLINES: Three RSS Feeds were searched through the Yahoo! Pipes software: World - Top Stories, Video - International, On Deadline. On average the three RSS feeds returned as many as three-quarters of “today’s” stories that came up on USA Today's website search, although on occasion the return dropped closer to fifty percent. It was unclear why there was a shift in the reliability.
Other Issues:
	The only non staff-written stories that came through both the RSS feed and the USA Today website were AP stories. The RSS feed returned the staff-written and AP stories with the same consistency.
	The only archived stories that came through the RSS feeds were video stories that were about a week old. The website returned both written articles and video stories that were up to two weeks old.
	Both the website search and the RSS feed returned multimedia. However, in the website search, the multimedia returned could only be found in the text of a written article. The RSS feed sometimes returned just the video clips themselves.
	The RSS feeds were consistent in what they pulled from the website search. When 10-12 searches were run through the feeds, the results returned were the same.
	Search results for the RSS feeds gave the articles’ headlines/summaries and the dates for most stories. The most recent stories (from the last 24 hours or so) were undated, so their timeliness had to be assumed. The stories that came through the website gave the time posted, although the “latest” stories (from the past 24 hours or so) only gave headlines (not the summaries) on the opening search page. The archived stories through the search gave a headline and a summary in addition to the date and time. On that opening search page, five stories of each were listed, with follow-on pages that could be opened.
(Graham Fitts and Sarah Merkey)

About USA Today

Circulation/Audience

2,272,815 daily (May 2006)

Online Access

No log-in needed.

Parent Company

Gannett Co. http://www.gannett.com/

Other Relevant Ownership and Interests

-90 Newspapers http://www.gannett.com/web/gan013.htm
-23 television stations http://www.gannett.com/about/company_profile.htm

Parent Company Revenue

$7.6 Billion

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