Paul wrote a good article on newspapers and their imminent demise yesterday … here is a slightly different take on the printed word …
I quite like my newspaper! Reading The Sunday Times over breakfast and through a lazy Sunday is one of life’s true pleasures in my opinion, but through the working week it is harder to achieve this due to lack of time – in my case I also live in the middle of nowhere so can’t have it delivered to read over breakfast anyway!
What to do?
I am a bit of a news addict – I listen to it on the radio, watch the TV news and also still read the papers. What I am doing now however is using technology to improve my news gathering and better satisfy my craving. I am doing this without any effort and also for free. I am focussing on the topics that interest me and can scan stories related to those subjects from a number of sources quickly and easily.
How?
I use Feedly which in my opinion is the best way to aggregate your news and any other data that you want to follow. It essentially provides me with my own personalised newspaper and it is free – rather than paying for The Times, Financial Times and Telegraph I now get all their stories, or at least the ones that interest me, in one place. I think it is great and would strongly recommend it!
In a business sense, as part of our research setting up social media campaigns and any online marketing campaigns we will research not only what our client is up to but what their competitors are doing. We do this through Google Alerts, which then feeds into Feedly. We obviously use this to see what our competitors are up to aswell! If you don’t have a Google account this is one good reason to have one for sure! Every time your competitor is mentioned in a new article or post you will know about it – which has got to be of some value, even if you are just a nosey parker!
Try out Feedly!