… something to write home about.

As some of you know, I can be a news and information junkie. When I work at home, I will have CNN, History Channel, Discovery or something like that on while I work, partly for some background noise but I also monitor and listen in when there is something of interest.

I also use a RSS news reader on a Pocket PC (pRSSreader) to download the posting contents from a variety of sources, more than 225 different web sites. It is a great way to pass the time waiting at the doctor’s office or trying to go to sleep at night. I use an online RSS reader (here is my public Bloglines list) as well as a back up and to read online comics, as those just don’t show up well on the small screen of the Pocket PC.

Surprisingly, I haven’t monitored local news this way. It isn’t that I’m not interested, it is a problem of signal-to-noise ratio. So much of the local stuff isn’t really news but features and they just don’t interest me much. However, today I thought I’d rectify that and subscribe to the feeds for the two major local newspapers.

Except that one of them, my preferred paper, doesn’t have a feed.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. I stopped taking the paper about five or six years ago as I didn’t read much of it except for the comics. When Comics.com started providing an email with my favorite comics each morning there really wasn’t a good reason to get the paper anymore.

The Deseret News, the more conservative paper, has a RSS feed that provides the lede or a short summary of the story and a link to click through to the full story. Yes, the stories are still mostly fluff but out of the fifty in my reader there were three that were interesting and one I clicked through and read the story on. Not bad.

The Salt Lake Tribune doesn’t have a feed. Not only is this a bit frustrating but it almost insures that I won’t ever go to their website. Not out of retribution or anything like that, it is just that they cease to exist as an easily accessible news source. Unless someone else links to a Tribune story I’m never going to see their articles, it is that simple. There are too many news ‘portals’ that are easily available that there is no reason for me to take the extra effort to look up the Trib.

Too bad though; of the two papers, I prefer to read the Tribune over the News. Mind you, I think I prefer City Weekly over them both, as it carries The Straight Dope but it is only a weekly.