PostsNews Research on news sources and media aggregation

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Publishing & MediaSeptember 14, 202613 min

RSS still powers the web's memory after 25 years

Follows the unlikely journey of a format invented by Netscape engineers that quietly powers every podcast you listen to while outliving every prediction of its death.

There is a good chance you used RSS this morning without knowing it. Perhaps an app on your phone checked for new episodes of a podcast you follow. Perhaps a newsletter delivery system confirmed your subscription. Perhaps a content automation tool published a post to your blog. In each case, a small XML file a web feed did the work, unchanged in its fundamental design since engineers at Netscape first proposed it in March 1999. RSS has been declared dead so many times that obituary writers have grown cautious. And...

Publishing & MediaSeptember 13, 202612 min

What Rural Journalism Experiments Teach Us About Building Local Information Infrastructure

Follows the documented story of The Ohio County Monitor and its rural journalism innovation lab to show what communities can learn about sustainable local news when resources are thin and need is acute.

The numbers do not look encouraging on paper. A county of 24,000 people spread across 600 square miles of rural Kentucky, where more than one in five residents lives below the poverty line and per capita income hovers around $20,000. The local economy once depended on manufacturing, coal mining, and tobacco farming. Chain stores dominate the town center. The nearest major city is hours away by car. And yet, in 2012, two brothers launched a digital news outlet with the explicit goal of making local accountability...

Publishing & MediaSeptember 8, 202610 min

The Volunteer Who Caught RSS When It Fell

When the creator of Tiny Tiny RSS walked away after twenty years, the open-source community did something unusual it simply caught the project and kept going.

Most assumed the death of tt-rss.org, a popular self-hosted RSS reader, was a natural consequence of declining interest in RSS itself. But when developer Andrew Dolgov, known as “fox,” announced its shutdown in October 2025, it wasn't a slow fade it was a deliberate dismantling of infrastructure, repositories, and community forum. This abrupt act sparked not resignation, but a surprising surge of volunteer effort to keep the open-source project alive. "The reasons for this are many but the tl;dr is that I no...

Publishing & MediaSeptember 4, 202613 min

Holiday specials faced collapse before becoming a TV tradition

How three separate productions The Halloween That Almost Wasn't, The Christmas That Almost Wasn't, and The Valentine's Day That Almost Wasn't each fought their own battles to exist, and what their survival tells us about the format that still shapes seasonal television today.

The Night Before the Premiere That Almost Never Was There is a particular kind of television magic that happens when a production barely makes it to air. The story behind the "That Almost Wasn't" series of holiday specials is exactly that kind of story three separate productions, across three different holidays, across three different decades, each one fighting its own battle to exist. And yet here they are, still available on streaming platforms, still discussed in fan communities, still carrying the quiet weight...

Publishing & MediaAugust 31, 202612 min

Journalism schools overhaul training to fight misinformation overload

From UNESCO frameworks to JEA lesson plans, journalism programs are quietly rebuilding how students learn to find, evaluate, and present stories in an era of shrinking newsrooms and endless content.

Misinformation false or inaccurate information, especially that intended to deceive poses an escalating threat to informed public discourse and democratic institutions. Consequently, journalism schools across the country are fundamentally overhauling their curricula to better equip students with the skills to identify, analyze, and combat the spread of false narratives. This shift recognizes that modern journalists must not only report the news, but also actively defend its veracity in an age of unprecedented...

Publishing & MediaAugust 26, 202613 min

Media repertoires framework reshapes how we study news habits

Three researchers set out to map how people actually encounter news today and in doing so, gave journalism scholars a new way to understand the fragmented, everyday reality of information consumption.

Ever wonder how people actually get their news today? It's rarely a single, conscious choice anymore. Instead, news now slips into our lives through phone alerts, social media feeds, background television, and a constant stream of apps a fragmented experience that challenges how researchers understand news consumption. This shift is driving the development of a new “media repertoires” framework for studying news habits. This scene, or something like it, plays out millions of times a day across the developed world....

Publishing & MediaAugust 24, 202612 min

NewsBlur's creator built a better way to follow the web

A decade after Google Reader vanished, one independent RSS reader is still quietly training itself on what matters to each of its users without an algorithm doing the deciding.

Drowning in information but starved for genuinely important news? Samuel Clay felt the same way, and that frustration on a New York City subway ride sparked the creation of NewsBlur. He wasn't aiming to launch a company, but to build a better way to filter the overwhelming flood of online content. NewsBlur's story began with a simple need: to cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters. NewsBlur launched publicly in mid-2010, following an initial beta phase during which Clay used his developer blog to...

Publishing & MediaAugust 20, 202613 min

Marco Arment and the Quiet Architecture Behind Modern RSS Infrastructure

How one developer's long obsession with open standards and readable text grew into Overcast, the Accidental Tech Podcast, and a quietly stubborn defense of the open web.

A Room Full of Podcasts, Held Together by Invisible Thread The episode count on the Accidental Tech Podcast had just crossed into the 700s when the show released its August 13, 2026 episode, "Past the Ternus Horizon." The three hosts Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa spent two hours discussing Apple Watch rumors, Mac backups, SQLite bugs, and car shopping. Somewhere in the middle of it all, a listener called in to share a story about Time Machine backups. The conversation wandered. Someone made a joke...

Publishing & MediaAugust 17, 202613 min

Researchers track scholarly impact with new influence-watching tools

Inside the open-source tools and Lens.org-powered systems that let researchers follow the ripples of any idea from first reference to global citation web.

Measuring the true impact of scholarly work is now faster and more comprehensive thanks to new tools designed to track influence beyond simple citation counts. These platforms go beyond identifying who cited a given paper, mapping the broader network of research that follows and is informed by it. This allows researchers and institutions to gain a more nuanced understanding of a work's significance and reach within its field. Ultimately, these influence-watching tools promise to reshape how academic impact is...

Publishing & MediaJuly 22, 202613 min

Mercury's rise Open source tool battles news link decay

Inside the quiet, decade-long journey of a parsing tool that newsrooms, researchers, and independent publishers now rely on to keep digital articles readable long after the original page disappears.

The Article That Vanished Imagine this: a researcher at a university media lab is building a longitudinal archive of local newspaper coverage from the past decade. They've collected thousands of URLs from historical databases, press releases, and citation networks. When they click through to read the actual articles, roughly a third of those links are broken. The page has been deleted, moved behind a paywall, or redesigned beyond recognition. Years of reporting have quietly disappeared. This is link rot in...

Publishing & MediaJuly 19, 202613 min

How RSS developers built a lifeline for screen reader users

Inside the accessibility-first movement that transformed feed readers from visual tools into essential instruments for users who navigate the web by sound.

The morning ritual begins the same way for thousands of users: opening a feed reader, scanning headlines, and deciding what matters. For most, this is visual work eyes scanning titles, thumbs swiping past noise, attention filtering signal from clutter. But for users who navigate by sound, by braille refreshable displays, by voice command alone, that same ritual required something fundamentally different from the tools the rest of the web took for granted. RSS readers Really Simple Syndication tools that aggregate...

Publishing & MediaJuly 18, 202619 min

How savvy companies hire elite C-suite talent on their terms

Fractional leadership has shed its niche reputation and entered the mainstream but most companies are still missing its strategic upside. Here's the practitioner's guide to getting it right.

There's a prevailing myth about fractional executives that needs retiring. The conventional wisdom says you hire one when you cannot afford the real thing when cash is tight, when the startup is too small for a full-time CFO, when you need to sound more established than you are. The consulting industry has done nothing to dispel this framing, positioning fractional seats as budget alternatives to the genuine article. That story is not just wrong. It is backwards. The companies getting the most from fractional...

Publishing & MediaJuly 16, 202611 min

Harvard team races to archive web's fading links

A group of researchers at Harvard Law School has spent years systematically checking millions of news links to understand exactly how and why digital references decay and what it means for the future of journalism.

Are the links that underpin our digital world quietly disappearing? A team at Harvard University is working to find out, systematically archiving web links even those pointing to obscure, long-forgotten corners of the internet like a 1998 New York Times article referencing a now-defunct Ohio zoning blog. Their work highlights a growing problem: the phenomenon of “link rot,” where once-valid web addresses lead only to error messages. This quiet, relentless audit has been underway for years. The researchers behind...

Publishing & MediaJuly 13, 202611 min

Open-source fans saved RSS from tech giants' neglect

When the creator of Tiny Tiny RSS announced he was shutting down after twenty years, one volunteer quietly stepped forward to carry the work forward.

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a project when its founder decides to walk away. In October 2025, Andrew Dolgov a developer known online as "fox" chose that silence. He posted a brief statement explaining that on November 1st of that year, he would dismantle the infrastructure powering tt-rss.org, including its Git repositories, cgit instance, and user forum. The message was characteristic: direct, unsentimental, and final. "The reasons for this are many but the tl;dr is that I no longer find...

Publishing & MediaJuly 10, 20268 min

RSS fuels podcast boom and its future

How a web syndication format born in the late 1990s quietly became the invisible infrastructure that lets any audio creator reach every platform without a single distribution deal.

Somewhere in the background of every podcast episode ever streamed, a small XML file is doing the work. It has no interface, no logo, no subscriber count. It asks for nothing. But without it, Spotify has no episodes to recommend, Apple Podcasts has no show to display, and Pocket Casts has nothing to subscribe to. The format at the center of all this is RSS and it is one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure in modern media that most listeners have never heard of. The File That Changed How Audio Moves...

Publishing & MediaJuly 6, 202610 min

Skeptic's guide to spotting BS is now essential thinking

Two decades of information literacy research produced tools that help readers move from gut reaction to grounded judgment and the methods keep evolving.

Critical thinking, specifically the ability to identify misinformation and flawed reasoning - often referred to as “BS detection” - is the disciplined art of evaluating claims based on evidence and logical consistency. This skill set moves beyond simply accepting information at face value and instead demands rigorous scrutiny of sources and arguments. In an era defined by information overload and the rapid spread of deliberately false or misleading content, effective BS detection is no longer a specialized skill,...

Publishing & MediaJune 29, 202613 min

Frédéric Guillot's Miniflux Essential reading for journalists and researchers

Frédéric Guillot spent years building a feed reader that removes everything you don't need and in doing so, created exactly what serious information workers have been looking for.

The Machine That Never Sleeps Somewhere on a server maybe in a basement in Switzerland, maybe in a data center somewhere quieter there's a machine that has been running without interruption for years. It wakes up every thirty minutes, reaches out to several hundred websites simultaneously, downloads their latest updates, strips away everything that isn't text, and presents the results in a clean, monochromatic interface. No advertisements. No recommended content. No engagement metrics deciding what surfaces first....

Publishing & MediaJune 27, 202611 min

Google Reader's death fueled a decade of RSS innovation

In the summer of 2013, Google killed its beloved RSS reader and inadvertently created the conditions for newsletters, independent publishing, and a dozen new ways to read the internet.

There was a sign in the Google Reader team's workspace at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California. "Days Since Cancellation," it read, with a number below: zero. It was always zero. The sign was a running joke, a dark acknowledgment that the team's beloved product lived under a permanent sword of Damocles. Nobody quite believed it would fall. But on March 13, 2013, Google dropped a blog post titled with characteristic understatement: "A second spring of cleaning." Buried in a list of discontinued...

Publishing & MediaJune 26, 202611 min

Duplicate publications erode research trust and harm science

A guide to understanding, avoiding, and navigating the rules around overlapping research publications

Duplicate publication the publishing of the same research findings in multiple venues is a breach of academic ethics with potentially far-reaching consequences. While not a new problem, the increasing pressure to publish, coupled with the rise of predatory journals, has led to a surge in duplicate submissions and publications. This trend erodes trust in the scientific record, wastes resources, and ultimately harms the progress of research. Addressing duplicate publication is therefore crucial for maintaining the...

Publishing & MediaJune 26, 20269 min

The Feed Architect How Open-Source Aggregators Became a Lifeline for Readers Seeking Something Different

When algorithmic feeds and paywalled tabs feel exhausting, one developer's weekend project and a growing ecosystem of self-hosted tools offer a quieter path to staying informed.

The Morning Ritual Nobody Talks About Every morning, Pedro Esteves opened his laptop to the same familiar chaos. Fifteen browser tabs, each a different publication: BBC for world news, TechCrunch for technology, the Guardian for science, Al Jazeera for a different perspective, ESPN for sports. Each tab loaded slowly, demanded cookie consent, prompted account creation, hit a paywall, or autoplayed a video before he could read a single sentence. It was exhausting, and it was the way millions of people started their...

Publishing & MediaJune 22, 20268 min

Inside the Discount Economy How TV Deal Aggregators Became a Morning Ritual for Millions

From GMA's Deals & Steals to Inside Edition's curated steals, a new breed of deal hunters has turned daily television into a launchpad for savings and a model for how news aggregation and media research intersect.

The Morning Alarm That Pays Off Every weekday around 7 AM Eastern, a specific kind of ritual unfolds in American households. The television switches on, coffee brews, and millions of viewers tune into Good Morning America not for breaking news alone, but for something more transactional: the Deals & Steals segment, curated by Tory Johnson since 2011. The segment has helped millions of viewers save on everything from home essentials to fashion favorites, with discounts often reaching 50-70% off retail prices. But...

Publishing & MediaJune 20, 202611 min

The Open Format Dave Winer, OPML, and the Simple Standard That Became News Aggregation's Backbone

How one software developer's quiet obsession with outlines became the invisible backbone of modern news aggregation and why his latest experiment with Markdown OPML might just wire the web together again.

There is a file format that lives inside nearly every RSS reader, every podcast aggregator, and most newsletter tools you have ever used. It is invisible to most users a quiet interchange format that moves subscription lists from one application to another, that structures hierarchical outlines, that carries the metadata of what you read and when. It is called OPML, the Outline Processor Markup Language, and it was created in late 2000 by a software developer named Dave Winer. Winer is not a household name outside...

Publishing & MediaJune 16, 202611 min

The Sony Turntable That Everyone Overlooks (And Why It Might Be the Right One)

The PS-LX310BT is dismissed as the budget option but a closer look at the specs tells a different story about what actually matters in a turntable.

There's a quiet consensus forming in vinyl circles, and it goes something like this: the Sony PS-HX500 is the serious choice, the one that serious listeners reach for when they want actual hi-fi performance without selling a kidney. The PS-LX310BT, by contrast, gets filed under "starter deck" a fine little machine for beginners, maybe, but not something you'd build a real system around. That consensus is tidy. It's also, upon closer inspection, backwards. Not entirely the PS-HX500 is genuinely a more capable...

Publishing & MediaJune 16, 202614 min

Brendan Eich's JavaScript The Code That Powers the Web

Dave Winer, RSS, and the Untold History of News Syndication traces how a New York software developer, working largely outside the spotlight, built the invisible plumbing that still carries news, podcasts, and blogs across the internet today.

There is a good chance that before you read this sentence, your phone, your desktop, or your browser fetched a small file from somewhere on the internet and showed you new content without you having to visit a single website. That small file the RSS feed is one of the quietest revolutions in the history of publishing. It happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s, largely through the work of one man: Dave Winer. The Boy from Queens with a Compiler Dave Winer was born on May 2, 1955, in Queens, New York City, the...

Publishing & MediaJune 14, 202613 min

The Reader Who Built a Lifeboat Edwin Khodabakchian and the Rise of Feedly

When Google pulled the plug on Reader in 2013, millions of users needed a new home. One serial entrepreneur was already waiting for them.

On a Thursday afternoon in March 2013, millions of people opened their browsers and found a goodbye letter. Google had decided to shut down Reader, its RSS subscription service, effective July 2013. For researchers, journalists, and obsessive readers who had built their workflows around the tool, the announcement felt like a library closing with little notice. Reader had been the quiet backbone of how many professionals tracked their fields every journal, every publication, every niche blog, organized in one...