create your own "newspaper"

I hardly don't read newspapers anymore, well not the way I used to which was folding page by page, quickly scanning the bold headlines and sometimes reading the first lines and maybe an entire article. But today there's Twitter! Important and less important news is brought to me by tweeps (people you follow on twitter). Anything from yesterday's bomb at Moscow airport to the 123rd glimp of the iPhone5. Sometimes it is brought to me by a serious journalist, a news channel or just a friend with an even nerdier interest in gadgets as me. Important, funny, useful and useless news, it's all there for me.

Since 140 characters are usually not even most of these tweets contain a link to a blog, a newssite, a YouTube video, etc. When travelling I just bookmark this links for later. I use ReadItLater which is integrated in my iPhone's Twitter-client and is integrated (via a Plugin) into my browsers on my laptops and PC. ReadItLater offers me the possibility to read the complete news-article, watch the video on a larger screen when I want to. 

Today a suggestion to one of the journalists I follow, @italiansweep a Dutch correspondent in Italy, led to a discussion with another tweep about the impact of my suggestion. So I started to search for an easy and fast solution, to prove I was right. My suggestion (to the journalist) was the following "why don't you share the most interesting articles you come across with us, and why not make a paper.li-like newspaper from it". I presume that as a foreign correspondent part of his day is filled with scanning the local (in this case Italian) media for interesting news. News that could be interesting for his home-country (the Netherlands in this case). Sometimes this results in an article for a newspaper, a blog or a video-item for an news website. Sometimes even an entire documentary. But many times he will read interesting news but decide not to use it or it is rejected by his clients (newspapers, radiostations, etc). But I am personally very interested in what @italiansweep considers interesting and would like him to share this info with me and others. Of course he  needs to oblige certain rules (copyright etc), but pointing his followers to interesting content is no problem. 

Okay so far the background, now to my solution. I've created a 5 step manual:

1. go to ReadItLater and register;

2. download and install one of the ReadItLater plugins into your browser(s), this adds a button to your browser allowing you to add an URL to your RIL-list;

( 2b. if you use a smartphone, add the App there as well and/or add it to your twitter client allowing you to save links included in tweets )

3. go and collect articles, pictures, video's... in other words: CONTENT and bookmark them to your RIL-list;

4. go back to ReadItLater, login and check the result, maybe delete some content; 

5. register for the RIL-Digest and share this with the world like I did, here is my public ReadItLater-list in Digest presentation

so from now on publishing your "newspaper" is nothing more then bookmarking interesting articles, et voila, they are added to your RIL-newspaper (Digest). Of course you regularly have to delete older content to keep it dynamic and clear!