On the Death of Newspapers
I have an old soul. At least that’s what one of my bosses at IBM told me once. He made the comment in referance to the fact that I would often bring a paper notebook to our one on one meetings instead of a laptop. I like paper, I like drawing, I like the printed page, I like books. You can’t exactly read Jasper Fforde or Terry Pratchett through the takeoff or landing of a plane with a laptop or a kindle. Sometimes I’ll read a book on my laptop, but that’s only because there isn’t a physical copy handy.
Everybody tells me that newspapers are dying. Which is sad. I can’t complain too much though, because I’m the demographic that’s killing them. I never subscribed. Part of it was that I didn’t really like the local newspapers, (although the Independant is great and it’s free), and part of it is that I’m not a morning person and generally a little rushed in the morning. As result most of my news comes from RSS feeds; sources such as the BBC and NY Times online editions.
Which brings me to my point. I always thought it would be great if I could get a newspaper that was personalized for me. It would aggregate my selection of news sources and simply format, print and deliver. I’ve been sick for the last few days and spent a lot of time on my computer. In that time I learned a bit about LaTeX, which is a way of laying out text. Apparently it’s widely used in the academic world because it’s a way of separating formatting from content and it does professional fonts pretty well. I hacked out a quick and dirty python program to grab an rss feed and turn it into a PDF via LaTeX. It’s not polished but it’s a Proof of Concept. rss2latex.py
I’m not sure I want to avocate printing off your RSS feeds everyday; it’s a waste of a lot of paper. However I think this idea could be developed to format RSS in a more Newspaper sort of format, complete with all my web comic strips on one page! Acrylic’s Times RSS reader tries to form RSS feeds like a Newspaper, and it’s a really nice looking program, however, it doesn’t work very well with web comic strips and when it comes down to it, it’s all about the funnies.