Introduction

How do you become the “go-to-person” in your field?

How do you increase your credibility and authority to become a “trusted guide” that people in your field rely on?

How do you make sure that your potential clients need to rely on you to stay on top of the trends, tools and technologies in your sector?

Based on my experience and insight one effective way to do so is by curating a niche news channel that brings together all of the most relevant stories, while contextualizing them for its audience and providing useful insights and reflections. 

20 years ago, in 2004, I introduced a word to define this type of news channel: I called it a news-radar.  And the person, the curator behind it, I chose to call him a news-master.

In this issue:

• NewsRadars & NewsMasters

• What Is a NewsRadar

• Key Purpose - What Problem Does It Solve?

• History

• Benefits for Readers

• Benefits for Curators (NewsMasters)

• Key Traits of a NewsRadar

• NewsRadar Publishing - Workflow

• Premium Section (for Premium subscribers only)

• → Top Tools to Publish a Newsradar

• → NewsRadars Examples

• → NewsRadar Promotion

• → NewsRadar Other Opportunities

• → NewsRadar Monetization
  

NewsRadars & NewsMasters

“What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about…”

Ev Williams at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs via Stowe Boyd’s blog

Why are newsradars and independent newsmasters so incredibly powerful for gaining professional trust in a specific sector?

For one they are extremely rare. You may search wide and deep but you will not find many people or companies who have taken this path. The reasons for this could be many and varied, but I tend to believe that the main reasons for this have been: 

• lack of awareness and examples of such a possible path

• lack of truly competent and knowledgeable experts 

• lack of appropriate technology, tools and platforms to do so 

Publishing a news-radar is a service that provides to those interested some truly valuable benefits:

• Laser focus on a specific topic

• Timeliness

• Synthesis

• Breadth of sources 

• Interpretation - Sense-making - Context

• Comprehensive vision (understanding)

• Further resources - Opportunity to discover more

That’s a lot of value in one very specific format. 

And this is not something anyone can do. 

To maintain such a strong focus, to provide relevant context and to interpret and to make-sense of the info / news / stories, a human with deep experience in the field is indispensable. 

The same task cannot be performed by AI (for the time being), because for now AI does not have the capability to match deep human experience, but it is limited to memorized concepts, ideas, notions received from existing information repositories, not by direct learning experience. 

Thi is why for a news-radar to be worth its name there’s got to be some form of human supervision capable of creative searching, pro-vetting and of extracting interesting and truly valuable insights. 

What Is a News-Radar

A news-radar is a news feed (leveraging the RSS/XML format) that brings together the most relevant news for a specific topic and audience. 

A news-radar is a topic-specific news channel curated by one or more subject-matter experts. 

A news-radar is generally maintained both by the use of tools, filters and algorithms that aid in scanning and identifying potentially relevant news, and by human curators who vet, add commentary, context and insight to them. 

Key Purpose - What Problem Does It Solve?

The key purpose of a news-radar is to provide a one-stop reference feed to keep interested parties always up-to-date on a specific topic.

Its key goal is to counteract the following problems:

1. The information tsunami keeps growing daily,

2. There are new blogs, X/Twitter channels, and news sources launching every day,

3. There is an increasing amount of personal, serendipitous, but also distracting colloquial content.

4. There is a growing amount of spam and marketing push masked as blog posts or press releases,

5. On X/Twitter and other social media channels, there are a large number of unverified news and stories pointing to low-quality or even missing pages,

6. It is hard for a newbie to distinguish a reliable, trustable source from a marketer or spammer,

7. Crap detection is a rare skill among users, and too much low-quality content sifts through unless properly checked,

8. Titling and meta-information are often misleading, ambiguous, or just not clear enough,

9. You can’t always be there. You can’t check the news 24 hours a day, seven days a week,

10. Unless you have some advanced skills, it may be difficult for you to find new relevant sources of information and news from the ones you know unless they are the ones to promote them

11. Relying always on the same sources tends to limit your view and awareness of other new ideas and opinions in your field of interest,

12. News stories need to be contextualized - sometimes, the relevance of a story for you can only be found by reading the story and extracting something else than the main call from it.

Thus the problems a news-radar solves, are essentially four:

1. The need to stay up-to-date on a specific topic/sector. Identifying new relevant stories, facts, info, resources, events, tools.
   

2. The need to avoid wasting time in checking numerous sources. Bumping multiple times into the same stories. Being too frequently interrupted and distracted by ads, and other non-relevant stuff. Eliminating duplicates, non-essential content, advertising, spam, low-quality info.
   

3. The need to see news and stories in context, from the perspective of a specific sector and audience. Providing context, insight, commentary.
   

4. The need to know more from someone trusted. Providing links, credits, additional readings and resources, reference info.

History

In 2003 RSS technology entered the scene, allowing anyone to follow all of the new information being published by any website without having to actually visit it. 

RSS technology allows any website, blog, podcast or other type of content channel, to generate a public file (RSS), that always includes all of the key elements of any new content being published (date, title, author, description, image, etc.).  

Thus, by “subscribing” (periodically scanning) such an RSS file it is possible to know and read any new content being published by a website. And if I subscribe to multiple RSS files (feeds) I can passively monitor all of what they publish without having to actually visit each one. 

I first coined the term news-radar in 2004 to describe the output result of someone utilizing RSS to monitor hundreds of websites with the goal of picking up and re-transmitting only the most interesting and relevant news relative to a specific audience / interest.

The person doing this work - in my view at the time - would be called a “news-master”. 

The reason for choosing the name news-radar is simple: it acts like a radar scanning and monitoring the “news” horizon and reporting on whichever news of relevance detected. 

Source: “Content Curation And the Future of Search: The Howard Rheingold’s Interview - 2011”

“If until yesterday you have relied on generalists on main TV channels and newspapers to “present” and report to you the news they got themselves from other sources, wouldn’t it be a step forward if now you could get:

a) The specific type of news you wanted

b) From those trusted ones you believe to be “in the know” in your field of interest?”

Source: Robin Good - “Real-Time News Curation, Newsmastering, And Newsradars - The Complete Guide Part 1: Why We Need It”

Benefits for the Readers

For readers, the main benefits of subscribing to a news-radar are:

1. Saves Time
People can subscribe specifically to your news selection if your focus matches their specific interests and save tons of time by not having to scan each and every news story from all the sites that cover their interests.

2. Keeps Them Updated
Guarantees the ability to stay updated on a specific topic at all times.

3. Provides a Trusted Source
Having an insider, trusted information source that can be relied upon for business, review, provide perspective and insight, while framing stories for the reader specific interest

4. Discovery
Enables the ongoing discovery of new news sources and market/topic/actors.

5. Diversity
Provides a channel in which diversity and varied opinions and more valued than anything else.

Benefits for Curators (NewsMasters)

For a newsmaster the key benefits in curating an information channel covering a very specific topic and audience, are:

1. Trustworthiness
Being seen as a trusted information source. Being seen as a needed one-stop shop to stay updated.

2. Thought Leadership
Authoring a news-radar entails high competence in a specific field, ability to identify high quality content and sources and skill to interpret, make-sense and highlight relevance of each in the context of the topic covered and audience being served.

3. Authority
When someone starts being a resource for news to others, he gains credibility and authority in his field of interest. Just like for newspapers, people view the ability to select and identify relevant news to publish as a high-authority trait. Who do you perceive as having a greater command of a topic? Someone who writes a news story for a news company or someone who picks up the best news from all of the authors of all the news companies?

3. Creation of Unique Value
Providing an original filtered news selection of what is to be read out there on a systematic basis can be of great value to your readers.

4. Visibility
By systematically curating a specific topic, and highlighting, citing and linking to many relevant sources there are much higher possibilities of being discovered, noted and linked to by other authors and news-masters in the same or in complementary and related fields.

5. Professional Networking
Authoring a news-radar is one of the best ways to discover, curate and become visible to key thought leaders in the same field. 

6. Lead Generation
A news-radar offers a lot of value that is readily visible and that keeps updating itself, thus motivating highly interested readers to subscribe by sharing their name and email.

7. Monetization Opportunities
Newsradars can be used in a number of ways to provide both extra value to your readers as well as to create more content on a topic, introducing a new content space for sponsorship, enriching an existing guide, and more.

Key Traits of a NewsRadar

How to recognize a news-radar.

If I was asked how I would recognize a news-radar from a blog, a typical newsletter, an Instagram feed or a Slack channel, here are the key traits I would list: 

• Covers a specific topic for a specific audience/interest/issue
  

• News are organized in reverse chronological order
  

• Updates periodically

• Updates are short - synthetic and info-rich
  

• Stories are contextualized for a specific audience / interest
  

• It’s authored by one or more human curators with names

• Allows for some form of interaction with audience
  (voting, liking, commenting)
  

• It’s searchable
  

• Has a full public historic archive
  

• Ads and sponsors are clearly labeled and kept separate from the other content

NewsRadar Publishing - Workflow

I could write an entire book on this topic, but to drill down on the essence for someone who is totally new to it, here are the key steps to produce and maintain a news-radar:

• Finding sources

  • Searching constantly for new interesting sources

  • Monitoring other news aggregators and directories

  • Following other news-masters and news-radars
    

• Monitoring

  • Subscribing / Generating RSS feeds

  • Web / Data Scraping 

  • Using Alerts and other monitoring tools
    

• Vetting

  • Verifying source trustworthiness

  • Grouping or eliminating duplicates

  • Filtering out shallow content

  • Filtering spam / advertising

  • Checking for AI vs human-generated content
    

• Sense-Making

  • Contextualizing

  • Highlighting

  • Synthesizing
    

• Referencing

  • Crediting sources

  • Providing additional resources

  • Linking out

  • List (main) sources publicly (don’t keep them secret)

• Sharing - Publishing

  • Public posting via website, feed, podcast, etc.

  • Making content available also via RSS

  • Archiving

*For those who are seeking to learn how to publish a topic-specific newsradar, I offer a private coaching program that assists in learning all of the steps, tools and techniques needed to become a trusted news source. To get more info, please fill out this form.

The Content Finder Toolkit 2024

I am releasing this week a special new curated content resource entitled the “Content Discovery Toolkit”. It contains over 500 vetted resources and apps to find any kind of content (from icons to films - and most of the time at zero cost).

Reserve your copy now.

This toolkit is the fruit of several months of work and it includes a one-of-a-kind, unique collection of tools and apps to find:

• News
  (top news sources - mainstream)

• Newsletters
  (find newsletters by topic, audience size, language, etc.)

• Discussions
  (comments, replies and threads from popular forums and groups)

• Trends
  (next hot topics, upcoming interests, emerging patterns)

• Images
  (stock and original photographs available for re-use)

• Videos
  (stock footage, clips, backgrounds)

• Icons
  (symbols, emoji, etc.)

• Cutouts
  (silhouettes PNGs on transparent backgrounds)

• Sounds
  (from nature, tech, work, sports, etc.)

• Music
  (tracks that can be used for audio/video)

• Podcasts
  (where to go to search and find them)

• Books
  (where to discover and taste new, rare and alternative books)

• Quotes
  (famous phrases and citations)

• Documentaries
  (where to find the best ones ranked and organized by categories)

• Alternative Search Engines

• plus Public Data Sets and Open Academic Resources (OER)

The Content Finder Toolkit is 100% free for all my premium subscribers across the three newsletters I publish:

• TRUST-able

• Good Tools

• Curation Monetized

If you are a premium subscriber you don’t have to do nothing. You will receive automatically as a new year present.

*If you are not a premium subscriber but wish to access the Content Finder Toolkit, you can upgrade before Jan.5th or you can reserve for yourself a discounted paid copy by leaving your name and email here.

Reserve your copy now.

Premium Section

→ Top Tools to Publish a Newsradar

→ NewsRadars Examples

→ NewsRadar Promotion

→ NewsRadar Other Opportunities

→ NewsRadar Monetization

(for paid subscribers only)