In news publishing, newsmastering is the content production process, first evangelized by Robin Good in 2004, that involves collecting, filtering and selecting topic-specific news stories, resources, tools from all of the relevant content sources out there while delivering the resulting highly focused news channels, the so-called newsradars, across multiple media such as the Web, RSS feeds, or email-based newsletters.

Photo credit: Alberto Perez Veiga mashed up by Robin Good

When newsmastering works, you can save yourself a great deal of time otherwise spent browsing tens of web sites, or RSS feeds lists, on your specific topic of interest.

The newsmaster is a news publisher who acts as a news DJ, picking, selecting and offering the very best and most relevant content items on the selected theme-topic.

In this guide I have personally brought together for you the full selection of Robin's best articles on newsmastering to help you make greater sense of what becoming a news DJ and creating a newsradar is all about.

This is the high-quality, non-automated, news gathering and republishing approach which could change completely the way you keep yourself updated while generating a publishable stream of highly focused news. Something that could prove to be very valuable for those many passionately interested in your topics of interest.

Here all the details:

Intro by Robin Good

Newsmastering: A General Overview

• What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars? RSS News Aggregation And Re-Publishing For Beginners

  

  Newsmastering is a new and emerging skill that involves gathering, filtering and selecting from the chaos of information that saturates the Internet, and delivering the resulting news feed to niche-targeted audiences.






• Web Content Formats - Links Posts: How To Convert Your Link Posts Activity Into Effective Niche News Publishing



From Steve Rubel to Sepp Hasslberger, many beginning bloggers as well as a good number of experienced ones like to publish (especially on weekends) posts that are nothing else but a collection of recommended links they are offering to their readers. These digests of links have gotten over time different names: link posts, linkstream, best links of the day, news grabs and so on, with a thousand different variations.






• News Aggregation Is Online Independent Publishers Natural Next Step

  

  If you have mastered the blogging paradigm, have made your blog an authority and a reliable source of information, commentary or news in your selected field(/s) of interest, it is about time to "scale yourself up" - Work Less and Look More At The Bigger Picture (= See the Future).






• The Human News Aggregator: An Interview About NewsMastering With Robin Good

  

  Marshall Kirkpatrick, the official online interviewer at NetSquared.org, took the time to cal me up and find out more about this emerging new practice and about the tools and processes required to make it all work.






• What Is RSS: A Guide To Really Simple Syndication Benefits, Best Uses And Applications

  

  This is a guide explaining what RSS is and how to best use it. It is targeted at the non-technical user who has not had yet the opportunity to fully understand what RSS is all about and how to best put it to use.






• The Network Second Layer: RSS Newsmastering

  

  Read slowly and with maximum attention what Stephen Downes says right here:

  "What should happen, what is already happening, is that a large network of sites like Edu_RSS should emerge, forming in essence a second layer in the network.

  The result of this second layer is that the internet will self-organize, that information generated in a thousand or a million places will cluster, become composite, interpreted, specialized, and produce highly targeted, highly specific resource feeds at the output end."






• What Public Relations Professionals Could Do With RSS: Newsmastering, Newsradars And Personal Media Aggregators

  

  If you have been wondering how RSS could be of use and benefit to PR work, this good audio conversation (38' minutes) with Sally Falkow, renowned PR and branding expert, should shed some new light on these interesting issues.






• Content Aggregation And The New Curators: Podcasting Newsmasters

  

  Unless we start to leverage the filtering ability of talented content curators, editors and newsmasters with the efficiency and speed of new tools which allow them to find, monitor and spot key relevant content bits, we are doomed to be either drowned in this chaotic cloud of content available to us or to miss a great deal of the very best of it.






• RSS Newsfeeds Aggregation: My Business Experience

  

  RSS newsmastering, or the ability to aggregate, filter and compile topic-specific news digests, has opened up several interesting opportunities to create quality new services while extracting good revenue from them. The same goes for feed sponsorship and ads integration. While I am not particularly in favour of this last one, there are specific instances and formats of RSS ad integration that will yield certainly good results.






• How To Create NewsRadars: Rok Gets The Good' Steps

  

  With inexhaustible energy Robin has been promoting the benefits of public and private News Radars to researchers, information professionals, corporate knowledge workers and independent publishers. See the Related Articles section at the bottom of this post for references to these articles. Before Robin adopted and refined the term, the concept of News Radars was mentioned by others, notably Rok Hrastnik and the people at MyST Technology. The latter company is currently using the term BlogSite Briefings.

Newsmastering Tools and Services

1. The First RSS Newsmastering Engine For Search Professionals: MySyndicaat

   

   Targeted at "professionals" researchers, information librarians, competitive intelligence analysts, information scouts and specialized news editors, the new technology makes it finally rather straightforward to create topic-specific newsradars (news feeds) on just about any selected theme.






2. From RSS Reader To Direct Online Publisher: Newsmastering Away With Blogbridge

   

   Making use of a good RSS feed reader is essential to the daily routine of most bloggers. Feeds give you a way to quickly seek out the latest hot news for your niche audience from across the web. Wouldn't it be nice, though, to be able to read your feeds and publish your blog posts from a single application?






3. Beyond NewsMastering: Yahoo! Pipes Is The Internet RSS Remixer - Overview And Reports

   

   Yahoo! Pipes, is essentially a very powerful RSS feed remixer, which goes well and beyond the original newsmastering concept I described a few years ago. Potentially, Yahoo! Pipes is a highly disruptive visual programming environment that puts in the hands of many people the ability to create web mashups and web-based applications that combine data from different sources with much greater ease and effectiveness.

Robin Good Shares His Top100 News Sources For Free

Do you want to access Robin Good news feeds lists? This may be a first initial step to become a newsmaster and provide your readers with niche-selected topics tailored to their needs.

To celebrate the recent partnership with The Federated Media Network, Robin is giving away his Top100 news sources list, the same one Robin and his newsroom use everyday to compile the MasterNewMedia daily breaking news selection.

To get this unique OPML file just spend two minutes of your time and share your feedback in a short survey about MasterNewMedia.

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on November 16th 2008 as "From News Publishing To Newsmastering: Learn, Understand And Experiment How To Create Your Own Newsradars - Sharewood Guide".