As TechCrunch’s Marshall Kirkpatrick noted, it was only a matter of time before someone put together free RSS feeds from college news organizations in a news aggregation site. And so they did: Campus Reader, rather brazenly branding itself as “America’s College Newspaper.”

If you care about your online news presence, you’ll make note of CR and whether you’re on the site or not. There’s potential for a wider audience for your content. For those worried about copyright, CR only previews an article, but you have to click through to the original site to get the full story. Also, any campus outlet that doesn’t want their content on the site can remove it.

And for those who are interested in what other college media outlets are doing, it’s an invaluable resource. I’d personally like to find a way to separate the multimedia stories into a separate category on the page.

There have been other campus “newswires” that distributed student news content, but none that I’m aware of that automatically aggregated content from RSS feeds.

On a larger level, there is the question of how much interest there is in a site like this.  I’ve e-mailed one of the founders of the service, and hope to have an interview in the coming days.
The interface could use some work - there are no photos, and the sliding “section head” box seems gratuitous, but it’s definitely a site to watch. They claim to aggregate content from over 300 college media sites. As College Publisher supposedly has contracts with over 400, and there are an unestimable number of media outlets that don’t have RSS feeds (out of over 2,500 outlets nationwide), there’s still ground for growth.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under Tech Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.