Return of the RSS reader

“It turns out we don’t want to live in our inboxes all day.”

Privacy-protecting browser Brave is introducing a new news reader, Brave Today, per Ars Technica. Brave’s news reader masks users’ reading behaviors by divorcing IP address details from content delivery requests. Once a user clicks on a news item in the feed, Brave’s reader directs traffic to publishers’ own pages. Brave Today is supported with privacy-protecting offers and promoted content.

This all sounds vaguely reminiscent of an RSS reader, and Brave isn’t the only one revisiting the potential for news aggregation. Substack has also launched at creating a “distraction-free space” to consume email newsletters that isn’t the inbox.

Google killed Reader back in 2013 (RIP ☠️). At the time, Google said its small but loyal user base was dwindling, and that the company was focusing resources towards promoting Google+ and Google Now for news. But the real reason Reader was killed, arguably, was because the aggregated syndication technology that gave readers a clean and consolidated personalized reading experience was fundamentally at odds with an advertising business model that depends on pageviews.

In Reader’s absence, Feedly has been quietly holding down the RSS front and has supported its business with power-user features available to premium subscribers. Feedly already supports email newsletter subscriptions for premium users.

Recent concerns over how our algorithmically curated news feeds are calibrated may drive users back to interfaces that allow hands-on subscription management, filtering, and sorting. It turns out we don’t want to live in our inboxes all day. The glory days of blogging may be making a comeback, if writers are landing on a viable monetization strategy beyond exploiting user data or ads. They’ll just need a place to land that’s not as cluttered as our inbox or as noisy as our social feeds.

Sara M. Watson is a technology critic and a senior analyst at Insider Intelligence.

Privacy-protecting browser Brave is introducing a new news reader, Brave Today, per Ars Technica. Brave’s news reader masks users’ reading behaviors by divorcing IP address details from content delivery requests. Once a user clicks on a news item in the feed, Brave’s reader directs traffic to publishers’ own pages. Brave Today is supported with privacy-protecting offers and promoted content.

This all sounds vaguely reminiscent of an RSS reader, and Brave isn’t the only one revisiting the potential for news aggregation. Substack has also launched at creating a “distraction-free space” to consume email newsletters that isn’t the inbox.

Google killed Reader back in 2013 (RIP ☠️). At the time, Google said its small but loyal user base was dwindling, and that the company was focusing resources towards promoting Google+ and Google Now for news. But the real reason Reader was killed, arguably, was because the aggregated syndication technology that gave readers a clean and consolidated personalized reading experience was fundamentally at odds with an advertising business model that depends on pageviews.

In Reader’s absence, Feedly has been quietly holding down the RSS front and has supported its business with power-user features available to premium subscribers. Feedly already supports email newsletter subscriptions for premium users.

Recent concerns over how our algorithmically curated news feeds are calibrated may drive users back to interfaces that allow hands-on subscription management, filtering, and sorting. It turns out we don’t want to live in our inboxes all day. The glory days of blogging may be making a comeback, if writers are landing on a viable monetization strategy beyond exploiting user data or ads. They’ll just need a place to land that’s not as cluttered as our inbox or as noisy as our social feeds.

Sara M. Watson is a technology critic and a senior analyst at Insider Intelligence.

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Nikki Usher   Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Burt Herman   Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Delia Cai   Subscriptions start working for the middle

Meredith D. Clark   The year journalism starts paying reparations

Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui   Millennials are ready to run things

Jody Brannon   People won’t renew

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

Aaron Foley   Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes   A shift from conversation to action

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

Marie Shanahan   Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

Tanya Cordrey   Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

Rachel Schallom   The rise of nonprofit journalism continues

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman   Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Juleyka Lantigua   The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned

Ben Werdmuller   The web blooms again

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Marcus Mabry   News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)

Nonny de la Pena   News reaches the third dimension

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

Cory Haik   Be essential

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Tim Carmody   Spotify will make big waves in video

Ben Collins   We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

Sarah Marshall   The year audiences need extra cheer

Candis Callison   Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)

Benjamin Toff   Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse

Annie Rudd   Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”

Francesca Tripodi   Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

An Xiao Mina   2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Patrick Butler   Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

Kate Myers   My son will join every Zoom call in our industry

Doris Truong   Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

J. Siguru Wahutu   Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves

Joni Deutsch   Local arts and music make journalism more joyous

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

Megan McCarthy   Readers embrace a low-information diet

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund   The virus ups data journalism’s game

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin   Media reparations now

Christoph Mergerson   Black Americans will demand more from journalism

Sue Cross   A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

Ashton Lattimore   Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

Rodney Gibbs   Zooming beyond talking heads

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

Brandy Zadrozny   Misinformation fatigue sets in

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

María Sánchez Díez   Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok

Bill Adair   The future of fact-checking is all about structured data

Hossein Derakhshan   Mass personalization of truth

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

Steve Henn   Has independent podcasting peaked?

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it

Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Sumi Aggarwal   News literacy programs aren’t child’s play

Jennifer Brandel   A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

Laura E. Davis   The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Richard Tofel   Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)

Astead W. Herndon   The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

Raney Aronson-Rath   To get past information divides, we need to understand them first

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

Rishad Patel   From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

Brian Moritz   The year sports journalism changes for good

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula   Expect to see more translations and non-English content

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Sam Ford   We’ll find better ways to archive our work

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

C.W. Anderson   Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?

Garance Franke-Ruta   Rebundling content, rebuilding connections

Imaeyen Ibanga   Journalism gets unmasked

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

Ariane Bernard   Going solo is still only a path for the few

Mike Caulfield   2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening