Tag Archives: NewsNow.co.uk

Archived content and RSS feeds: The NewsNow problem

Interesting issue flagged up by Jon Pratty yesterday – publishers need to be careful when running archived pieces on their sites, because of RSS feeds.

As part of a series on Guardian.co.uk, the site published a piece yesterday from February 23 1972 headlined ‘IRA kills 7 in raid on Paras’ English base’.

On the site we can see it’s from the archive and the date it was first published, but sites such as NewsNow.co.uk, which aggregate news headlines from RSS feeds, don’t make the distinction.

There’s no label in the RSS feed to denote this is archive material, so to readers of the news on NewsNow, it appears like so:

Screenshot of NewsNow.co.uk

We’ve seen in other – non-RSS related, but similar – cases, how things can escalate when old news resurfaces such as the United Airlines story.

A flaw with aggregation or the responsibility of a publisher?