Kissing the NYT and WSJ good-bye in my feed reader

I have more than 1,000 unread items in my Google Reader. I'm sure you do too. I have two tactics to try to keep that manageable:

1. When I do get a chance to read items, anything older than 3 days old gets marked as read immediately. Exceptions are made if the items were written by a blogger or friend whose material I don't want to miss. Steve Yelvington, Howard Owens, Ken Ficara and C.C. Chapman come immediately to mind here. I also give folks to whom I've newly subscribed a chance to make a similar impression: John Wilpers and Beth Harte are the two latest additions to my Google Reader.
2. I don't subscribe to RSS feeds that don't include the full content (more thoughts on that here). It's a matter of efficiency. I want to consume the content in a single environment. I bounce around enough in my work day as it is. If I actually find a few spare moments to catch up on Web reading, I want to do it on a single platform, and not bounce open more tabs in my already crowded Firefox.
   

There had been an exception to rule #2. If it was content I could not or should not live without, I kept in the reader -- until today. So long, New York Times Media & Advertising feed. Adios, Wall Street Journal Media & Marketing news.

I don't think I'll miss them. If there is anything there that I need to read, I am pretty sure the folks above will blog about it, or TechCrunch or Silicon Alley Insider will point me to it -- so long as I catch it in my 3-day window. The ultimate safety net is my Google Alerts.

The only newspaper feed still in my reader? The Cape Cod Times, my hometown daily and alma mater. Their news feed is also only a partial-content feed. I'm not yet ready to pull the trigger on it, as it does connect me to what's going on back home while I am at the office in Waltham. But I am finding there are alot of days that items go unread, and I do apply the 3-day rule to their feed a few times a month.

I have 181 other subscriptions in my Google Reader, and as a former newspaper fellow, one would think I would be hyperinterested in newspaper content. That 181:1 ratio is pretty exemplary of the single-biggest challenge facing media companies today: The competition for readers' media time.

And that ratio doesn't even take into account all of the other ways I spend my media time: Netflix, movies in theaters, podcasts, music, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, books, Sunday paper, food magazines, television, plus Web sites related to my current vocation.

All this points to the need for anyone distributing content to make sure that content can be made available on the platform of the readers' choice. And the single easiest way to do that is to put all of the content -- not just snippets or teases -- in an RSS or equivalent feed.