Nwanews.com Offers RSS Feeds

The Web site for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest Arkansas edition, Nwanews.com, is among a growing number of newspapers offering RSS feeds of their content.

The site — which contains content from the D-G, The Benton County Daily Record, the Northwest Arkansas Times and three small regional papers — launched a feed in late December of all the papers’ daily news headlines. Before that, it launched a WholeHogSports feed of Razorbacks news.

RSS — which stands for “really simple syndication” — feeds are increasingly common throughout the Web, with everyone from major media outlets (The Washington Post, BBC, New York Times) to Weblogs (Gizmodo, Adrants, SlashDot, Wonkette) offering them.

RSS feeds allow readers to gather the latest headlines from news Web sites and blogs in one place, whether it be a news reader, a blog of their own or a personalized homepage such as those available at My Yahoo! Rather than check a list of 30 bookmarks for favorite sites each day, Internet surfers can go to one place and see linked headlines from all those 30 sites.

The links take customers straight to the news content.

Steve Jarvis, Nwanews.com’s Web publishing manager, created the Nwanews.com feeds on his own. He said demand for the WholeHogSports feeds began among rabid Razorback fans, who constantly troll sports news sites and message boards in search of the latest Hogs scoop. Jarvis plans to add more news feeds in 2005, making more content available from the other newspapers that populate Nwanews.com.