I consider myself fairly well informed. I read a number of different publications to stay up to date with current events, the latest technology, or even just a bit of celebrity gossip. I’m a busy guy, I have a lot going on and I don’t have a bunch of time to just sit around reading different websites. I, like many others, rely heavily on RSS in order to get the most of my online leisure time. I use the fantastic Google Reader application to aggregate the feeds that interest me into a single easy to sort through interface. I’m subscribed to several national and international news feeds like the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. I’ve got feeds for a couple of the social news websites like Digg and Reddit. I’ve got a few feeds for Google News searches on topics that interest me. Lastly, I’ve got a few blogs and other miscellaneous feeds. I can quickly scan the headlines and read an article if it is of actual interest to me. All of this gets me fairly well informed on what is going on in the nation, and in the world. That is the problem….

You see, a lot goes on that is relevant to me, and that I would be very interested in knowing, but I’m completely clueless about it. The world around me, around where I live, isn’t well represented online. I want to be able to access my local news just like I access the rest of my news. I want to be informed about what is going on without spending unnecessary time on it.

I live just outside a moderately sized city in Northern Colorado called Longmont. We have a local newspaper called The Daily Times Call that covers local current events. The newspaper represents Longmont as well as several of the smaller communities around Longmont like the one I live in called Firestone. According to the wikipedia article on Longmont, as of 2005 it has about 76k residents and 26k households. If you include the surrounding communities my best guess would be that the newspaper could potentially reach as many as 40k homes. I have no clue how many subscribers have, but it would certainly be a small subset of that. The Times Call has always been a good newspaper. I’ve been a subscriber on and off over the years. I even delivered papers for them when I was much younger. My problem with the Times Call is that my options are fairly limited on actually getting the news from them. Today, it really breaks down to either of the following:

1) Subscribe to the dead tree version of the newspaper. There are lots of reasons why this isn’t ideal for me, and I would guess a lot of folks like me. The print version is a huge waste of paper. It takes a significantly longer time to sort through the articles. Using an RSS reader I can glance over 250 stories and read the ones of interest before I could even get through the first section of the print version. The print version is largely ad supported which just adds more heft to its size. Most importantly however is that the print version isn’t always available when I want to read the news. I frequently read the news at work, at home, or on my mobile device. It is really just a matter of whenever I can grab a free minute.

2) Read the news on their website. The downsides of this are that their page has a relatively poor user interface. It is loaded down heavily with advertisements. The biggest downside is that I have to remember to go check it. Google Reader is routine for me, it’s my source of news and information. To get the local news from the Times Call website, it requires an extra step of loading up a separate page trying to make heads or tales of the articles they have on their site.

Over the years I’ve done both methods. I gave up on the dead tree version a couple years ago in preference to their website. Up until just earlier this year they didn’t even publish most of their local stories on their website. The only thing up there would be the top couple of lead articles. These problems aren’t unique to the Times Call either. I’m sure there are some exceptions out there, but when I did a casual survey of several other local newspapers throughout Colorado I found a similar experience.

If I could dream up a solution to these problems it would be content created by individual journalists, paid journalists, and amateur bloggers alike. The content would be well organized and tagged not only for category or type but also for geography. A social network, or digg/reddit like approach would be used to identify popular stories for the masses but that content wouldn’t drown out the local information that might not have as much of a mass appeal.

Until my news and information utopia exists I need to come up with a real interim solution. I’ve contacted the Times Call on several occasions asking, begging, for RSS on their website. My emails seem to have fallen on deaf ears as I have never received a response. I assume that they are tied to an old and outdated business model and are afraid to move into the modern age. They keep tight control over the methods in which their content is viewed so they can pump the pages full of ads. I respect that, I understand that is currently their way of making the web profitable. I also understand that this isn’t the business model of the future. Content like theirs is only valuable if they have an audience to read it. Increasingly so, folks are turning to other methods to become informed. Technologies like RSS are disruptive, game changing. They empower users to be in control, not the publishers. The Times Call is the best there is for covering news about Longmont, Colorado but the last place I would turn for news about the war in Iraq. They don’t have the resources to provide quality coverage of national and international topics of interest. Each news source has it’s place and as those niches are carved out each publication will have it’s own following.

The Times Call, and local newspapers like it all across the country, need to do what they do best. Provide great coverage about what is going on in our communities. They need to provide that coverage in ways that are accessible to everyone. From folks like my Dad, who I don’t think I could even explain to him what an RSS feed is let alone get him to use one. To folks like me, and many of my peers and friends who want to make the most of our busy lives but still be informed about the communities we live in. If the local newspapers don’t adopt a different business model for the web, they will continue to see their subscriber base shrink. I’m happy to pay online subscription fees for access to quality content. I know nobody works for free and someone has to pay the bills. Let me pay the Times Call $10 a month for access to their RSS feed, hopefully advertisement free. If that doesn’t work, just publish the article title and a synopsis and force the user to access your website to read an article they are interested in. At least this way I know what is on your site and if I want to read it I’ll be subjected to all of your advertisements.

Since neither of these solutions have happened so far, I’ve decided to take matters into my own hands. I created an application that harvests the article contents from the Times Call website and then redistributes it in RSS format. It took me all of a couple hours to put this together and test it. It is working great and myself along with several of my friends are now using it. While this doesn’t help most people out there, if you happen to live in and around Longmont and want to access the Times Call in RSS format you can get the feed at http://vallery.net/timescall.xml.

Happy reading!