Slate never ceases to impress me. You can now get the day’s summary of the news as text files, brought to you by those good folks down in D.C.
The idea is simple: Subscribe to our new Today’s Papers textcast feed just as you would to any other podcast. Every morning, we’ll deliver to your iPod a small file containing the full text of that day’s summary of the top stories from the nation’s best newspapers. You can then read the text right on your iPod’s screen. (Note: At the moment, this service works only with iTunes and relatively recent iPods with screens.)
As I wrote back in February, the iPod is not currently configured as a text reader, so we’ve done our best to work around the device’s limitations. (Here’s hoping Apple will make its cash cow more text-friendly in future releases.) That said, I’ve been testing the TP textcast for several weeks now, and I find it very easy to use. Plus, I love that Today’s Papers just shows up in my iPod automatically each day.
Here’s a little more detail on how the textcast works: The text is actually contained in a 15-minute audio file. (It’s 15 minutes of silence, which is how we make the file so small.) Play the file as you would any other podcast, and then hit the iPod’s center button two or three times until you reach the description field, which contains the full TP text. You can scroll through the text using the iPod’s scroll wheel.
