Why FeedJournal? (or why the information age matters)

The idea of an RSS syndicated newspaper came to me when I was subscribing to a morning newspaper last year. I hadn't had a morning paper for years then, so it was all a bit new to me. I really enjoyed to have access to news hot off the press, which I could read without having to stare into the computer monitor; for example in the comfort of my bed, sofa, or while traveling. But there were two things I strongly disliked about it: the monthly subscription was fairly expensive and I didn't really care for a majority of the content in the newspaper. The competing newspaper had a few sections that I would much rather read, but I couldn't afford to spend my time reading more than one morning newspaper. I knew that there were better ways out there for accessing relevant news in a comfortable way. I just needed to find them.

Content is king. There are no two ways about it. When people were talking about the information age ten-fifteen years ago I didn't get it. I didn't see how the management and distribution of content could become so central in a society that it would name a whole time period. But I am starting to see it now, how a low signal-to-noise ratio can kill the greatest endeavor; how the delivery of timely and to the point information can be of extreme value; and how the production of high quality content in itself can form an outstanding business plan.

I’ll say it again, the "production of high quality content in itself can form an outstanding business plan". Traditionally and historically the great content producers also had to be great content deliverers in order to survive. They had to make sure that the newspapers or books were printed and delivered to make any kind of business. Today, all of this has changed. Today, we have electronic delivery of the same content that used to make up newspapers and books, through for example the World Wide Web.

But along with the change of delivery method we as customers are losing out on some of the great and time-proven ways of accessing the content. We need to make a compromise between reading a newspaper online with all the latest events, or in paper format using news that in our fast-paced life are already old (just by a few hours but still old). This is where FeedJournal comes into play. FeedJournal serves as a content deliverer and presents information from whichever sources you want in a traditional format that was the default way of reading news for a very, very long time.

Of course, this is just one out of many of FeedJournal’s benefits over a traditional newspaper. It also empowers the user with the option of collecting multiple feeds to create a newspaper that is tailored for her own needs: with the local team’s results, the stock portfolio’s development or even personal e-mail. It gives the user the possibility to choose the deadline to be the exact moment she wants, not six hours before it will actually be read. And of course the paper size can be decided: A4, A3, letter size or why not an index card version that you can put in your Hipster-PDA? Gone are the monthly subscription fees for delivery, you only need to pay for the actual content in case your favorite news source doesn’t provide it for free on the web already.