Johnston Press quits internet news feeds..?
THIS is very odd and disappointing. Every single RSS feed from the newspapers of troubled publisher Johnston Press I subscribe to (17, since you ask) appears to have stopped over the past day or two. Even Belfast’s News Letter has “This feed no longer exists” displayed at the top of the feed. I found them very useful for NI News, but does anyone know why it’s happened? Is it revenge on free news parasites? Or just an technical glitch? This comes as three groups are shortlisted by Johnston to make final bids for its southern Irish regional newspapers. According to the Irish Times, the sale is “not expected to achieve much more than €40 million”, while the group has debts of £477 million.
The Dromore Leader website is still going, but Safari wouldn’t open the feed for me – whether that’s because it isn’t there any more or what I’m not sure. The decline of local papers will surely lead to a decline in local communities – recently the Leader was helping to stir up people in Dromore to save a residential home from being closed by the Southern Health Board – would it have been saved if there wasn’t local communications to drum up support?
Gonzo, you could stick each of these through Feed 43 (fiddly but very useful) and then put all the feeds through Yahoo Pipes so you could build yourself one handy Johnston Press meta-feed.
There seems to be nothing wrong the feed links you posted – temporary absence, or browser issues your end? Either way would make this piece seem a tad sensationalist
Given that some of the papers are posting content via twitter too these days, it seems very unlikely that they’d pull RSS altogether….
The feeds are back, but they had ALL gone. I checked, believe me, as I found it hard to understand how the websites would still be updating but not the RSS feeds.
It clearly was a technical issue at their end.