I went to look at a story in the Deseret News today and found that their site was rather unresponsive. I cam back after a couple of hours to look again and found that the site had been completely redesigned since I last looked. From a features and layout perspective it looks similar to the new York Times, although the style is still quite different (less polished). As I looked around the new site I found that they now offer RSS feeds.
I think that every news site should be offering RSS feeds. There’s no reason that people should be required to come to the site to find out if there is new content, or what that content is. The day’s of “bookmark this” and “make us your home page” are ancient history on the internet because anybody who really wants to be informed is going to be looking at multiple sources of news and information these days. If I have to visit your site to find out what you’ve got you can expect me to look elsewhere for my news.
This is not really a plug for the Deseret News. Mostly I am just excited by this because I remember looking at a variety of newspaper sites a while back for my RSS reader and there were hardly any local (read state of Utah) news organizations that had RSS feeds available. I’d still like to find something with news centered in Lehi, but at least I have one more option than before in the state.