However, pressed by need, I have looked into this notion of "making your own newspaper". If you are interested in the Middle East, here is how I do it:
In Safari, go to the newspaper you trust and would like to have as a source. Navigate to "World News" and see if there is a tab saying "Middle East" in the menu. Go there, and then look in Safari's address field, notice if the icon "RSS" appears at the end of the line. If so, that page "feeds" news or headlines which you can subscribe to. If you see it, select the item under the icon (either "RSS" or "Atom", they work the same way). You are taken to the feed page, where you see just the text of the news items, as it appears in the feed.
You can subscribe in various ways:
- You can create a bookmark for that newspaper's RSS page, the one you are in now. Then you can later manually go back there, and you will have an updated list of Middle East news that appeared in that newspaper. Some journals post the full text, others just a line or two, with a link to the full item. Safari lets you do stuff like sorting the items on the page by date and title, how much of the story you want to display, etc. You can also search within the articles. If you save several feed bookmarks to one Safari folder (sub-menu), you can display all items from all feeds on one page. (Firefox etc. do things a little differently, but also provide special RSS functions)
- You can also instead read it in Mail. In Safari, go to a feed page you like, and click "Subscribe in Mail". Mail will then display a mailbox header "RSS", and you will find your newspaper feed in there. Again, just the text, and either the full text of the news article, or just a link to the newspaper's web page so you can scan and read what seems interesting. One advantage with getting them in Mail, apart from the fact that you are being updated continuously without any action on your part (but can ignore the RSS mailbox until you are ready to check it), is that you can use regular Mail actions on them. E.g,, you can set up a Smart Mailbox to read simply "All of: Message is of type RSS; Message is Unread", to get all new items collected; or "Message contains: Kuwait", to pick out just those news items that concern your particular area of interest (if the keyword is listed in the headline or teaser that is sent to you).
You can choose to get news feeds appear in your Inbox, and it looks like emails (except for a blue header on all items), but technically it is not, the items are not sent through your email provider, but directly from the newspaper website to Mail. Therefore, if you have set up Mail to synchronize between e.g. home and office Macs with an imap account, these RSS feeds will not synchronize (but the smart mailboxes will: so they will be empty on the other machine). You can of course set up subscriptions to the same feeds at home, but the read/unread status will be separate on each machine.
- To synchronize, you may instead want a separate news reader that does that. There are probably several solutions, but one that seems almost standard is Google Reader (reader.google.com). You need a Google account for this, I believe, at least I hooked up with mine. You then add feed subscriptions (addresses from the feed pages you've found), and Reader will then collect news items from them. You can see each feed (each newspaper's stuff) separately or together, as a list or the full items; you can see just new (unread) stuff or all stored news, you can search (from the newspaper's archive, long before you subscribed if available), and you can do stuff like mark and share individual items. As this is all stored on Google, it is all synchronized whatever machine you read from.
- This is also convient for iPhone / iPad consumption. There are many RSS apps, and most of them synchronize with Google Reader. I use one called Reeder (about $3). You organize the subscription of sources etc. on the web in Google, in the app you just sign in with your gmail name when you set it up. Then, whenever I open it, it collects new items (just unread or all, your choice) from Google Reader and displays them, so you can just continue where you left on on your Mac. Thus, web and iPhone works well together with Google Reader. You can of course also combine Google and Mail subscriptions, but then the read/unread status of the items will be separate, of course.
In sum: I now susbcribe to about ten international journals who have Middle East pages: Guardian (I think the best in number or articles), New York Times, CNN, BBC, Independent, Le Monde, al-Jazira, al-Masri al-Yawm. In the current crisis, that provides about a hundred articles a day on Middle Eastern stuff, hopefully that will become more manageable when the conflicts simmer down. Of these Guardian and Masri al-Yawm provide full-text articles I can read (or skip) directly, the others provide links which makes it quick to run through the list and pick out those worth reading. I end up reading more of the Guardian stuff, however, because it is just there. In any case, with these sources, I get a pretty complete overview of what happens as it is reported. So, using this stuff, it is starting to feel like I really do have a fairly good in-depth personal journal of Middle East.
The key is of course that your interest coincides with the newspaper / news source's organization, so that there is a separate RSS feed for the area of your interest. There are probably not separate feed pages for "butterflies" or "vikings". You would then have to find the closest general source, and use searches or smart mailboxes or similar to pick out your particular interest, if that works. And, of course, proper blog systems always do automatic feeds (thus also this one), so you can also use the same procedure to follow new items on blogs you find interesting.
The Middle East feeds I currently follow:
The Guardian
New York Times
Al-Jazeera English (Middle East)
BBC News
CNN.com
The Independent
Al-Masry Al-Youm: News from Egypt
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