As a technology professional, I carry a smart phone. I use this phone to text, tweet, call, email, read RSS feeds and much, much more. One thing I like to have on my phone is local news, and for this there is no stronger solution than an RSS feed with a web browser.
The North County Times provides a minimal set of RSS feeds. I would be surprised if you realized this because they do such an excellent job of hiding them. Go ahead, try to find them. I will give you a hint at the bottom of this entry. The Times however really doesn’t want you to read any stories from the feeds. The don’t persist any old stories and typically only have two or three stories in the regional sections at any time.
However, their feed service is a great deal better than their mobile version. Here’s the link http://m.nctimes.com. To be honest, it is possible that the times could do without a mobile version, except that they have made their site so navigation heavy, and so poorly laid out, that any attempt to view their normal site on a small screen device with limited bandwidth is an excercise in frustration.
Now, maybe the NC Times fears that it will lose advertising revenue if it offers good feeds and a mobile site, but since I can get my other news from sites that do offer these features I can guarantee that they are losing revenue by not providing a mobile portal.
Oh, and the link to the RSS feeds?
You can specify categories from the site (e.g. /news/costal/carlsbad)
[UPDATE 3/10/2009]
A quick Google seach turns up the NC Times RSS page. There are a lot more options available using the syntax demonstrated by the links on this page. As an example http://www.nctimes.com/?searchrss=1&d1=yesterday&d2=tomorrow&%20tags=(carlsbad)&l=10 provides Carlsbad news.
I had forgotten about this because of some issues I had with my mobile device, however these links work fine in other readers, Firefox or Google Reader so I blame my mobile device.
Tags: mobile browsing, newspapers, RSS