How To (And How Not To) Respond To Readers

Saturday afternoon, I whined here that the Dallas Morning News had no RSS feed for their excellent state news section.

Shortly after whining, I emailed them and asked if they could provide a feed.

I got an email yesterday (Sunday!) that the email was forwarded to their web development folks.

I got a followup email this afternoon that my requested feed is now available.

That’s an outstanding response by the Dallas Morning News.

In contrast, I emailed the Chron.com folks on Jan. 20 asking that they either include the columnists in the RSS feeds for individual sections of the newspaper, or set up an RSS feed for the columnists, like many other newspapers.

The response at the time: They have “other priorities.”

There is still no RSS feed for the columnists on Chron.com.

One newspaper gets kudos for responding promptly to a reader request. One does not.