What an RSS feed is and why your outlet still needs one

Every time RSS is declared dead, it turns out to still be the pipework carrying half the internet. Every podcast runs on it. So do news aggregators. And if your outlet wants its content to travel beyond your own website, the route probably goes through there.

What an RSS feed is

An RSS feed is a file your website generates by itself and updates every time you publish. Inside is a list of your latest pieces in a format any program can read: title, link, date, author, a summary and, when properly configured, the image.

The difference from your website is who it is for. Your site is built for people: design, menus, advertising. The feed is built for machines: no design, no noise, just the data.

That is exactly what makes it useful. An aggregator does not have to guess which part of your page is the headline: you are telling it.

Why it is still alive

RSS stopped being a consumer product when Google shut down its reader in 2013. But as infrastructure it never left:

• Podcasts are RSS. Every single one. When you subscribe to a podcast, you are subscribing to a feed.
• News aggregators use it to know what you have published without crawling your whole site.
• Automated newsletters and many social media tools are fed by it.
• It is the only channel you control. It does not depend on anyone's algorithm and cannot change its rules overnight.

That last point is the important one. When a social network decides to reduce the reach of external links, outlets that depended on it lose traffic overnight. The feed keeps working exactly the same.

What it does for your outlet

A properly configured feed lets you:

1. Get picked up by aggregators. Many, including Snurkel, are fed by RSS. Without a feed, they simply cannot include you.
2. Reach readers who never visit your homepage. Very few people type a news domain each morning; almost all traffic arrives article by article.
3. Automate your own distribution to newsletters and social channels without manual work.
4. Avoid depending on third parties. It is yours and nobody can take it away.

How to find yours

You almost certainly have one already, even if you do not know it. Try adding these paths to your domain:

If opening it shows a wall of text with <item> tags, it works. On our page for media outlets there is a tool that checks your domain and tells you what we pick up from it.

What a well-built feed looks like

Existing is not enough. These are the points where most feeds fall short:

It should include the image

This is the most common failure, and the most expensive. Many systems publish the feed without the featured image, so your story appears in aggregators as a grey block of text next to competitors whose stories do have one. The image belongs in an <enclosure> or <media:content> tag.

If your site runs on WordPress, this happens by default: it does not include the featured image in the feed. We have a free plugin that fixes it with no configuration at all.

It should carry a summary, not the whole article

A full-text feed invites people to read you away from your site. With a summary and a link, the reader ends up visiting. Not so short it says nothing, not so long the click becomes pointless.

The dates should be correct

Each piece needs its real publication date. If everything comes out dated today, aggregators cannot order them and you end up looking like an outlet republishing the same thing daily.

It should hold enough items

Ten or fifteen is reasonable. With two or three, a single failed check leaves you out until the next one.

It should be stable

The feed URL should never change. When it changes without warning, everything connected to it silently stops receiving you.

If you run an outlet and want to appear on Snurkel, just send us that address: we review it by hand before adding it. It is free and non-exclusive, always with your byline and a link back to your site. Full details on our page for media outlets.