News at the Speed of Blog

Major news outlets are no longer the only things shaping the news discussion in this country. More and more, bloggers and the blogs they blog are steering the debates. Email alert subscriptions and RSS feeds for WordPress are allowing timely blogs to reach a wide audience the second they post to the Net, which in many cases beats news agencies by minutes or even hours (which is like months or years in newstime).

WordPress RSS feeds connect writers to readers in a way news outlets simply cannot equal. While some news readers may prefer to follow a certain journalist within the agency, that is much rarer than a reader choosing to follow an entire channel or network. But in the world of the RSS feed for WordPress (and indeed, for most blogging software), the exact opposite is true. Readers are pulled in by one writer, and want to know precisely when that author posts new content.

The result is, when breaking news happens and bloggers write about it, the RSS feed WordPress utilizes performs the same function as the AP news wire or any “breaking” coverage by any agency. The blog is immediately syndicated to any subscribed readers, but from a source that the readers know and trust to give them information they want, so the articles have a much higher likelihood of being read right away, rather than news articles that sit in an aggregator until the reader can find time for them.

So where do the bloggers get their information? The exact same place their readers do… from other bloggers and from news sources. But thanks to social media and WordPress RSS feeds, those news stories can spread more quickly than ever before, sometimes going viral before the major news outlets can even sit down to start writing about it.

Want to be part of the cycle? Be sure to add RSS feed to WordPress blogs you publish, and keep subscribing to the WordPress RSS feeds of the bloggers you love. In this age of the Internet, the faster the info travels, the better informed we all stay.