Australian media has an RSS problem

As I write this, Facebook’s blackout of news content in Australia is only one day old. How long will it last? Nobody can say. What effects will it have on the media industry in Australia? Only time will tell.

There has been a lot of complaint from media companies about the blackout. There are fair and important grievances, like the bungled rollout which saw community organisations and government departments wiped off the site right alongside news.com.au and the Chaser. But much of the ink spilled is asking one plaintive question: “how will people get our news, if not on Facebook?”

News organisations rightly see themselves as providing a valuable public good, and this is especially true in rural areas and for marginalised communities. But the truth is, the media have had the tools distribute their content, without relying on Facebook, for roughly two decades now. They have neglected to use these tools, and now they and their readers will suffer for it.

Let’s assume that the media’s concerns about people not being able to access news content except via Facebook are genuine. If so, then these organisations should have seen their dependence on Facebook as a problem and done something about it long ago. If Facebook’s extreme action (prompted by asinine legislation cooked up by NewsCorp) causes the media to do something about this dependence now, belatedly, well: it’s better late than never.

The tool I’m referring to is none other than the humble RSS feed. Quoting Lifewire:

RSS is a way for website authors to publish notifications of new content on their website. This content may include newscasts, blog posts, weather reports, and podcasts.

This is the technology that powers your podcasts: to find new episodes, your phone or app consults the podcast’s RSS feed, which lists all the episodes. It is also the technology that powers the indie blogosphere. I subscribe to dozens of RSS feeds from bloggers I enjoy, and get to see when any of them has published a new piece.

Many media organisations do provide RSS feeds - if you go digging for them. But broadly, the state of RSS feeds across the Australian media landscape is disappointing.

Now, why have we gone on this little adventure cataloguing the state of an obscure technology which news organisations seem to not actually care about? Because RSS feeds are not only simple, they are a radically democratic way of distributing information.

When a Facebook user (whether that’s a publisher, or just a member of the public) posts to Facebook, that post is given to Facebook for them to distribute how they see fit. Facebook’s algorithm is responsible for determining what you see when you log in. It tends to work pretty well at finding things you want to see - that’s how it has come to dominate our lives and our discourse.

RSS feeds, on the contrary, offer the reader the entire menu of content that a news website has published. Once you, the reader, have grabbed the list of articles (using one of the many different RSS reader programs), you get to decide what to do with that list. Want to hide all articles tagged with “crime” or “celebrities”? That’s a decision you get to make for yourself, rather than an algorithm deciding you have an aversion to those things.

This is why topic-specific feeds and consistent, detailed tagging are important: they allow the consumer of the feed to make choices about their own consumption. The major websites publish dozens, if not hundreds, of pieces every day. It’s too much of a firehose of information for any person to feasibly ingest. For this reason, we turn to aggregators and gatekeepers of all kinds.

Maybe we tune in to the evening news to get the headlines. Maybe we let our favourite friendly podcasters tell us about what they thought was important this week. Maybe we subscribe to a digest like Axios’s daily email (if we have an unhealthy interest in US politics), or another niche mailing list that caters to geeky interests or one that is local to our town.

But apparently, most of us simply let Facebook’s algorithm decide for us. This is what Ben Thompson predicts in his theory of aggregators:

The key characteristic of Aggregators is that they own the user relationship. Critically, the user chooses this relationship because the aggregator offers a superior service … Aggregators make it dramatically simpler and cheaper for suppliers to reach customers (which is why suppliers work so hard to be on their platform).

If media organisations had spent the last decade providing high-quality RSS content, encouraging its use, and promoting its culture, they might have avoided this mess. A shocking thought experiment: what if they had collaborated to facilitate the creation of a modern and popular RSS reader app where people could discover their content? (Special shout-out to The Guardian, which recommends people use FeedDemon, an app which was discontinued in 2013.)

Emily Bell muses about this in an article for The Guardian:

Highly digital newsrooms that have resources and strong relationships with their audiences started moving away from Facebook a long time ago, and are less affected by its volatility … The main problem with legislation that seeks to fund a news industry directly from Facebook and Google, is that it does not forge a clear path away from the duopoly entirely.

While she posits that “more regulation” would be the way to escape the duopoly, I am convinced by Ben Thompson’s argument that regulating aggregators is often like pushing on a string.

Now, I’ve assumed that the news content is valuable, more valuable than engaging in conversations about that content with your friends (and strangers!). I’ve also ignored the commercial side of this equation, the question of how news organisations fund themselves. That is really the key issue at stake in this fight, though here I’ve focused just on the content distribution question.

Because of that assumption, I’ve posited that a more democratic way of distributing that content, via RSS, would have ended up with better outcomes for everyone. I don’t know if it would happen. I don’t know if the average news reader would adopt a technology like RSS, even given a slick app to do it with. But I think a world where we are delivered news directly from sources we trust, unmediated by powerful aggregators, is a better world.

So what should be done?

I want to call on news publishers and community organisations: take this opportunity to escape Facebook. Aggregators are not your friend. For a non-Facebook example, see Google’s AMP.

If you have an audience that depends on your content, do everything you can to encourage them to consume your content directly. This can be done via email, RSS, your own website, or even a custom-built app (but please don’t do that). Focus on providing value, and allowing your readers to find the content that’s most essential to them.

If you publish an RSS feed, make sure each article is consistently and usefully tagged. Even one large feed with good tags is probably better than multiple feeds categorised by topic. And make sure people know you have a feed! A short page explaining what RSS is, how to use it, and why they might want to, would go a long way. Link to Feedly or NewsBlur, both of which are active and featureful.

It’s going to be a bumpy ride, but maybe we can come out of it with a healthier media landscape.