FT and The Economist offer RSS feeds

As a long-time subscriber to the Financial Times online edition, I’ve wished they would offer RSS feeds instead of email alerts and newsletters. I’ve unsubscribed from every email newsletter from every website that offers them wherever there’s an RSS alternative.

I had some email correspondence with the FT last October about RSS; they told me then: “There are actually plans to launch an RSS feed and this is part of a wider current development program being introduced to FT.com. Timescale has not been placed when this feed will be implemented.”

So it’s great to learn today (via Drew’s post) that the FT now has RSS feeds for a wide range of content. Just as with RSS feeds from papers like the Wall Street Journal‘s online edition, if you click on a link in the feed, you’ll get the subscriber page at the FT unless you’re already a subscriber.

So it’s headlines only unless you have a paid subscription.

On the FT site, you can select the RSS feeds you want to receive in your RSS~reader. The subscribe page currently lists 14 feeds. The page includes clear explanations of what RSS is and why it’s useful plus links to the websites of a number of RSS readers.

They’ve done a good job in making it easy for anyone to understand the benefits of getting FT headlines via RSS feeds. Nice communication work!

The next one I’d like to see offering a wide range of RSS feeds is The Economist.

I also had some email chats with them last October; they said: “Thank you for your mail and your interest in Economist.com. We are planning to add a RSS feed to Economist.com in the future. I am afraid there is no definite date set yet but an announcement will appear on the site when the RSS feed is added.”

Well, I just noticed that they now do have two RSS feeds available – a weekly feed for the table of contents of the print edition, and a daily feed for stories published in Global Agenda.

A way to go to match the depth of what media like the FT and WSJ are doing, but it’s a start.