in Feed Readers, Feeds, River5, Rivers of News |

Creating an aggregator for Portland protest news

Recently, I tried out two tools for creating RSS feeds from Twitter account timelines. My next step was to put this into use for tracking news on a topic. Since I live in the Portland, Oregon area, I thought it would be good to be able to collect Portland protest news from Portland news media, reporters, protest groups, and city/county government into a single easy-to-access source.

My first step was to collect RSS feeds or Twitter handles from news sources. Sadly, the main newspaper in Portland (The Oregonian) does not seem to offer RSS feeds, but I did find some for several other newspapers. What I did find, though, is just about everyone news org is using Twitter to broadcast links to stories. I decided to make TweetsToRss my tool of choice for turning those Twitter timelines into RSS feeds.

Once I had a set of feeds, I made a copy of the single page app for my normal RSS feed reading, and made a few changes to the template. Since I had quite a few feeds, I decided to group them into four categories:

  • News Orgs – Newspapers, TV news
  • Reporters – Reporters from news orgs as well as freelancers and other people covering the protests
  • Groups – Protest groups
  • Government – Portland city government (mayor, city council, police bureau, police union) and Multnomah County government (county sheriff dept)

I then modified my template to add tabs for each of these categories. You can see the result here. I am interested in feedback on the design and in suggestions for additions to the feed list. If you have feedback, send it to andy at andysylvester dot com. Thanks!

 

 

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  • In July 2020, I created a news river to track what was going on in the Portland, Oregon area regarding the daily protests (George Floyd/Black Lives Matter). That river has been very helpful to me, but I felt that there was not a good place to capture the highlights of that river. After discussions with Ken Smith, professor of English at Indiana University-South Bend, I decided to start a project to collect those highlights, document them, and to try to provide some insights into the ongoing struggle in Portland regarding police brutality.
    That project has created Portland Protest News, a news site summarizing the events in Portland related to the ongoing protests. The site publishes a daily list of links to articles and videos about the Portland protests. Users can sign up for a daily email with links of the day, subscribe via RSS, or go directly to the site. If you have any interest in following this topic, Portland Protest News is a valuable resource.

  • Creating an aggregator for Portland protest news andysylvester.com/2020/07/25/cre… @tessriski @karinapdx @mallisonKATU @BrennaKellyNews @TheRealCoryEl