Editor, revised

The other day I joined the club about how time-consuming it is to keep up with my RSS feeds. Why do I call it a club? Because a Google search tells me people have been moaning about this for at least three years. That’s OK. Although redundant, the exercise was cathartic.

And it yielded ideas. My friend Sara passed along the tip of organizing feeds by importance: must read, would like to read, entirely optional. 43 Folders shares a similar but more detailed take on this method.

A good idea, I thought, but can I really stand to throw away my careful categorizations? Well, I don’t have too. Google Reader and, I imagine, any decent feed reader will let you assign feeds to multiple folders/categories/tags. (Continues below the image.)

Here’s how I organized mine:

• !Must: Miss these and I’ll feel really guilty. Most have to do with my job and industry. The ! moves this grouping to the top of my subscription navigator pane.
• !S-R: These are Spokesman-Review blogs, and I must stay up on them. But I created a separate category because there are so many.
• !Like to: I can let these pile up and check them as I have time.
• !Gravy: Pure entertainment.

My other problem was retaining the information I read. No quick fix there. Now I just put faith in the brain that got me through college and grad school without too much sweat and trust I’ll retain anything ultra-important. And I use Google’s starring function or a del.icio.us bookmark to file away anything that might have reference value.

Why bother to repeat what 43 folders said so well? Maybe a different audience will find this post. Why do I spend time worrying so much about an activity that’s supposed to be leisure? In an industry that’s going through hull-puncturing changes, I’m pretty sure that that someone out there is going to come up with an idea that could help me maintain a livelihood in journalism or online media.

This morning I tried to catch up with my RSS feeds, my daily review of which fell apart during a particularly hectic week at work. It took me an hour to scan about 200 posts from the blogs and rss feeds that I’ve categorized as “new media” in Google Reader. That included reading in full those items that particularly caught my attention and visiting links that compelled me.

Now my rss reader tells me I only have 231 unread items. But what have I gotten for my effort besides that smaller number? A headache, and the feeling that I’ve been cramming for tests in about five different subjects the day before the exams. I’d have a hard time articulating just what I’ve “learned,” but I know it covered topics such as video production, the dire straits of the newspaper industry, citizen journalism, online April Fools gags, online publishing trends and several conferences related to this kind of stuff.

I would love to read a tutorial that goes beyond an explanation of using rss, such as embedded in my previous post about Common Craft, and learn expert blog readers’ tips for managing all this information and putting it to use. I think I saw one on a feed a few weeks ago, but, befitting my problem, I’m not sure where it went.

I love that there’s so many ideas and so much information bouncing around on the Internet. I just don’t want to use all of my free time trying to stay up with it. If you’ve got a suggestion, please leave it below.

… you should be. If you work in the media, you need this tool to keep track of the thousands of ideas, tools, projects, tips and events that are cropping up in blogs and other online media.

The video below will get you up and running better and faster than I can. Common Craft is a great site I only recently discovered and added to my own RSS feed in Google Reader. Lee and Sachi Lefever form the Common Craft team, based out of my hometown of Seattle, and they put together paper cutout animations that are fun to watch and easy to absorb. Check out the archives of the Common Craft Show for more essential video training.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU&hl=en]

Taking a cue from my friend and co-worker Nick at Stories on the Run, I decided to present a completely self-serving snapshot of my workstation for the week while I fill in as Web editor.

Pictured: MacBook Pro (fast and loaded with software); PC for running our editorial software, CCI; Sony HDD video camera; pad (still have to take notes at meetings); headphones; Nalgene bottle (stay hydrated).

Absent: AP stylebook and dictionary (yes, I still need them); tripod.

Actually, the only thing different from my usual workstation is the PC. Normally I just dock my MacBook to a second monitor and keyboard and mouse, running CCI from a parallel server.

But I’m in the hot seat this week because of babies being born and vacations. I get to do everything my fellow producer and I usually do, plus act as de facto assistant city editor for the Web. This means I can tell our mojo reporter Tom to go cover stuff or make a call to the cops when I hear scanner traffic. So far, he’s pretty much done that on his own.

But mostly I’m just a gateway for information, determining what goes up, how it’s packaged and in what order. In addition, I’m editing my “Today in pictures” slideshows and blogging about our morning meetings. It’s a full plate, and it reminds me a little of being a wire editor with a bit more multitasking. And since processing, synthesizing, editing and analyzing are my favorite things to do with my brain, it’s a plate I hope stays loaded.