About News Feeds

What is a news feed?
News feeds, also known as web syndication and RSS (which stands for “Really Simple Syndication”), allow you to see when websites have been updated with new content, such as latest news or new blog posts. Instead of visiting multiple websites to check for updates, you can view all the latest updates in one place as soon as they are published.

PRSSA currently offers news feeds for its news headlines, latest job and internship listings and blog posts. You may also subscribe to “All Updates,” which contains updates from all PRSSA news feeds.

How to start using news feeds?
To start using news feeds, you need a news reader, also known as an aggregator. This is a program which checks the feeds you have subscribed to for updates and lets you read or, sometimes, notifies you of any new content.

Sample news reader screen shot (click to enlarge)

There are many different readers available, some are web-based, others are downloadable applications. A web-based reader enables you to check your feeds from any computer, while a downloadable application notifies you of new content and lets you store it on your main computer.

Once you have a news reader, you can subscribe to news feeds by clicking the RSS orange icon and either dragging the URL of the feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.

How to get a news reader?
Here are a few news readers you might try:

Windows

Awasu

FeedDemon

Newz Crawler

Mac OS X

NetNewsWire

Newsfire

Web

Bloglines

Google Reader

FeedZilla

NewsGator

Browser

Mozilla Firefox

A larger list of news readers is availble on Wikipedia