Robin Good has a great new article on his blog about a topic near and dear to our heart: “News Aggregation and News Mastering.” As usual with his writing, there’s a nice step by step exposition of a topic that can quickly get confusing for beginners.

I believe Robin himself originally coined the term newsmastering:

“What Is NewsMastering?

Newsmastering is the process by which a human being identifies, aggregates, hand-picks, edits and republishes a highly-focused, thematic news via RSS. Newsmastering allows dedicated news editors (newsmasters) to remix and contextualize the existing tsunami of breaking news for very specific audiences in one thousand and more ways.” (from What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars?)

From there, Robin goes step by step through the procedure and process that you can use to be a newsmaster, why you might do it and how. You really should read the whole article. Along the way there’s also a very nice plug for BlogBridge:

“Blogbridge is a great cross-platform open-source RSS feed reader, aggregator and publisher. It can hook up directly to your existing blog publishing system to create a seamless bridge between your news production and your more traditional site publishing chores. BlogBridge has a cool interface, many valuable features and great support.” (from RSS News Aggregation and Re-Publishing for beginners)