Geodog

The Washington Post does RSS -- badly

I grew up in Washington, DC, and even after 20 years on the West Coast, I am used to reading the Washington Post daily, even as it has slowly transformed itself from the anti-establishment hero of Watergate in my youth to the neoconservative Republican paper of today. I have displayed its headlines on my personal news page for years, and use the headlines to pick which stories and columns to read online every day. Today the format of the headlines on my site changed drastically.

The good news? The Washington Post finally started offering official Washington Post RSS feeds. No longer do I have to rely on Mike Krus' excellent NewsisFree services to get Washington Post headlines. I can go directly to the horse's mouth.

The bad news? The RSS feeds are crippled. Each one has only a few headlines -- for example the Top News feed and the Opinions feed each currently have only 3 headlines. So now I only get some of the stories on the front page, not all of them. And where are the columns by my regular columnists, Colbert King, David Ignatius, and Richard Cohen (now that he has regained his senses)? The headlines also have the inane text (www.washingtonpost.com) at the end of each linked headline, as though anybody clicking on the linked headline would be taken somewhere else. It looks like something that would have been put on the web in 1995, not 2004.

This is a really foolish way for them to put content out to people -- it is one of those cases where halfway is worse than none. By having only some but not all of the top headlines, they make it less likely, not more likely, that people outside Washington will rely on Post for news. By putting the stupid (www.washingtonpost.com) in every headline, instead of just the first or last one, they make it less likely that someone will want to display their headlines on their site.

My guess, from years of reading the Post and reading about the Post, is that it is the result of political infighting inside the Post between people afraid of giving away their content, and people who see the value of syndicating headlines as a way of increasing influence and getting more people to read the Post online. It certainly looks like a typical Washington political compromise, ugly and satisfying neither opponents nor proponents of the measure.

As far as I can tell from searching Google and the Post's own site, there has been no official announcement of the production of RSS feeds, other than this stealth mention on page F7 on March 14, so perhaps the format isn't set in stone, and there is still time to influence it.

I urge other RSS users to write the Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, the editor of the Fast Forward personal technology section, Rob Pegoraro, the dot com columnist, Leslie Walker, the Financial and Technology editor, Dan Beyers, and the Associate Editor, Robert G. Kaiser.

Perhaps if they are beaten on the head with the clue stick often enough, they will see the error of their ways.

Update, April 23: To date, I have received nice supportive responses from two WP reporters, and Getler, the ombudsman, forwarded my comments on to the head of the web team at the Post, but nothing from the editors, and no change in the RSS feeds. It is such a minor thing, but it would also be so easy to do right. I wonder if anyone at the Post has even compared their feeds with the Userland/New York Times feeds? Maybe if some other people who straddle the tech / journalism world pointed out the problems, and how bad the feeds look compared to the NYT?