• by Ross Fadner , October 25, 2004

Global content provider Factiva, a joint subsidiary of Dow Jones and the Reuters Group, will deliver a series of free really simple syndication feeds that relate to the U.S. Presidential election, the company said Monday. The feeds cover election-related topics including jobs, the economy, health care, the war in Iraq, and budget and taxes.

"RSS seemed like a natural complement to our news content," said Diane Thieke, director of public relations for Factiva Inc. By adding Factiva's feeds to their RSS readers, consumers will have instant access to presidential campaign news as it happens.

The effort, which started today, is Factiva's first attempt to support and provide free content to the public, said Thieke. Factiva is a pay-for-news service comprised of over 9,000 multilingual sources appearing in multiple language interfaces. Thieke said that customized feeds of Factiva's enormous database of private content are available to Factiva's paid customer base, who must set up and install the service themselves.

Factiva will not be using any of its 9,000 exclusive sources for the presidential feed. Instead, Factiva's editorial staff will trawl information from over 4,000 public Web sites covering the Presidential election.

When users subscribe to a feed, an RSS reader, or RSS aggregator--which users must install on their computers--continuously taps the Web site of origin to automatically update content in real-time. Readers display content in text form, allowing users to scan headlines for the stories they want to read.

Factiva provided media outlets with news feeds about the conventions earlier this year. After the conventions ended, customers requested more coverage of the topic, Thieke said.

Thieke also said the company has no plans to continue serving the public feeds after the election ends, but added that there is always a possibility, should "the right situation" arise. "There are no definite plans for the near term," she said.

Factiva is the news provider for both the Dow Jones and Reuters newswires. Its list of global clients includes Altria, Ford, Nestle, HP, and Airborne Express.