Giving Google Reader a second chance

I’ve been taking this four-week distance learning Journalism 2.0 course from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas – a training program from the University of Texas at Austin. The course is about discussing the benefits of the information age and also about learning how to use tools provided by the Internet to help our reports and researches.

This week, they asked the students to start using RSS feeds and writing their impressions on their blogs. The initials stand for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a tool that allows users to subscribe to news feeds from various websites and be notified when something new has been posted or published.

The teachers asked us to choose between web-based platforms and stand-alone readers. I’ve been using RSS for about a year and a half now, but I have to admit that I never got along with any of those models. I always thought it was much simpler to follow the news directly on my Firefox. I’ve set up some feeds on my toolbar, so I can check the headlines and, when something seems interesting to me, I click on it to read the story.

I also have to say that I’m not an RSS-freak. I think it’s because I don’t really have the patience (or the time, I guess) to read the absurd amount of information produced by my favorite newspapers and websites. That’s why it didn’t work very well when I tried to use Google Reader (a web-based platform) about six months ago. It was too much information that I kind of felt that I had to read.

Anyway, I recognize that these readers are extremely useful for journalists and for people in general who are used to reading blogs and websites on a daily basis. It helps you organize the updates from your favorite sites and not to get lost on what you have and haven’t already read.

So I gave Google Reader one more chance and a set up feeds and separated them by categorias: Brazil (O Globo, O Globo – Rio, Folha de S. Paulo, Josias de Souza, Estado de S. Paulo, G1), World (New York Times, Le Monde, El País, The Guardian, The Economist), Music (Stereogum, Pitchfork Record Reviews, Pitchfork Best New Music, Ilustrada no Pop), Blogs (Desculpe a Poeira, Novo em Folha) and Etc (NYT Magazine).

As our teachers asked us, I also subscribed to a couple of search news feed (Darfur and reforma tributária), which helps us keep track with news items with a specific word. I used a similar kind of tool when I was working on my graduation paper on Journalism school about the coverage of African countries in the media. I went to Google News and subscribed to their e-mail news alerts for words such as Africa, Nigeria, Sudan and Darfur. Of course my mailbox was jammed with articles. The RSS news feed is a great tool for managing this kind of information.