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I would venture to guess that the majority of us get world news solely from our own country. It’s not necessarily our fault. Most cable and satellite TV providers do not offer international news channels (CNN & BBC being the only exception here in Canada). I can only speculate as to why this is the case, but you don’t have to limit yourself to a single biased source of information.  With the Internet, you can get the news immediately from whomever you want.

When it comes to world issues, I believe that it’s important to get a balance of opinion from different news organizations. If you want to be open-minded and have a balanced perspective on world events then you need to consider opposing viewpoints. You can do that by using RSS to subscribe to multiple international news sources.

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is another means by which news publishers and bloggers distribute their stories online. Most news publishers have several “RSS feeds” that you can subscribe to. These feeds cover different topics like top stories, finance, sports, health, etc. Whenever they release a new story, it will be added to the appropriate RSS Feed. If you are subscribed to the feed with an RSS feedreader program, a short description of the story will be automatically downloaded to your computer. Then, when you have free time, you can browse through the headlines and open the articles that catch your attention.

You can subscribe to feeds from multiple news sources. So, for example, you could subscribe to the “sports” feed at CNN and the “world news” feed at BBC and Al Jazeera.

What are the benefits of RSS?

• Receive only the news you want (sports, finance, business, etc) from a variety of sources
• Avoid advertisements
• Save time by not having to navigate news websites
• Be alerted when new content becomes available
• Develop a balanced opinion by subscribing to multiple international news sources

How do I subscribe to RSS feeds?

• The latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer have built-in RSS feed readers.
• Use Google’s RSS Reader service reader.google.com
• Download and install a feed reader program. In this article, you’ll learn how to use a free one called FeedReader to subscribe to RSS news feeds.

Feedreader looks and acts similar to an email client like Outlook. However, instead of checking for new email, it checks for new headlines and content from websites you have subscribed to. Headlines are automatically purged from the list when they expire so you don’t have to worry about deleting them.

In this example, we’ll use Feedreader to subscribe to some RSS feeds available from CBC, a Canadian news station.

STEP 1: DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL FEEDREADER

To get started, download and install Feedreader. You can download the installation file from here. If you need assistance downloading or installing it, watch the video tutorial at the bottom of this article.

STEP 2: FIND AN RSS FEED

Instead of wasting time trying to find RSS feeds on a publisher’s website, I search for them directly with Google. Usually searching for the source’s name followed by “rss” should return the results you want.

You can see the first link returned by Google is exactly what we were looking for.

Click on the search result to get a list of all the RSS feeds that CBC has to offer. You can see in the screenshot below that CBC has feeds for World, Money, Health, Technology, and more.

STEP 3: ADD THE FEED TO FEEDREADER

In this example, we’ll subscribe to the Top Stories RSS feed at CBC. Highlight the feed URL and copy it.

Now open Feedreader, click “File”, select “New”, and click “Feed”:

The feed you copied from your web browser should already be in the feed URL box. Just click on OK:

STEP 4: BROWSE THROUGH THE HEADLINES

Now you can browse through CBC’s top stories.

When you select a headline, you’ll notice a short description of the article on the right side of the window. If you want to read the full article, just click on the headline:

The article will open, by default, in Feedreader’s internal web browser. To have it open in your web browser, you’ll need to change some settings. I’ve covered how to do this in the “Further Reading” section below.

Now we’ve subscribed to Canadian news. It’s time to subscribe to some more international feeds. Here are links to news sites and their RSS feeds:

• BBC
• CNN
• Aljazeera

FUTHER READING

Disable Notifications

By default, Feedreader will alert you with a popup and sound when a news article is released:

If this annoys you, you can change it. Go into the settings by clicking Tools and selecting Options.

Uncheck “Play sounds” and set “Display notifications” to not display notifications.

Disable Internal Browser

By default, when you click a headline in Feedreader, it will open the article in its internal web browser. If instead you want it to open in Internet Explorer or Firefox, go into options and set the behavior to open links in the default browser.

VIDEO TUTORIAL

This video covers the download and installation of FeedReader as well as how to subscribe to news feeds.

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Tags: feed reader, news, RSS

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