Creating Your Personalized News Cast

A channel defines which feeds goes into each episodes, how many articles in each feed and the order these articles are presented. In short, it is your personalized news cast – hence World News, Your Way.

News Anchor automatically gathers articles in the RSS/ATOM feeds and generate channel episodes from those articles.  In other words the feeds are aggregated to form channel episodes.  Each episode of the channel is generated periodically based on your preferences. To create a channel click on the Create Channel button in the tool bar or choose the Create Channel from the File menu in the top menu bar.

Enter the Title and Description of the channel for your reference.  Optionally change how often do you want News Anchor to generate the channel’s episodes and choose how many generated episodes you want to keep.  Note that episodes are only generated when News Anchor is running.  When you have done entering these information, click on Continue.

Choose the RSS or ATOM  feeds that this channel will gather articles from.  The left box lists your subscribed feeds and the right box shows the feeds that you have assigned to this new channel.  Use the arrow buttons to assign or remove feeds from assignment or drag-and-drop the feeds between the two list boxes.  Click on Continue to proceed.

When you have made feed assignments, you can then choose how many articles from each feed that you want in the channel and the order these feeds are presented.  Select the minimum and maximum number of articles from each feed by clicking on the min/max dials (note that the min value cannot exceed the max value).  Furthermore you can advise News Anchor to aim to collect only a certain total number of RSS articles for this channel via the slider at the bottom of the list – note that this number is only a hint and the number of articles generated in each episode may differ slightly from this number.

You can also change the order of the feeds’ presentation in the channel by dragging and dropping the feeds within the list.  In the screenshot above, this channel will present 2–4 articles from Yahoo! News, followed by 1–3 articles from Deadspin: top and then closed by 3–4 articles  from Yahoo! Entertainment.

When you are done, click on Finish and News Anchor will create the channel and generate the premiere episode for it. Note that you will need to be connected to the Internet if you also want the article images to be loaded as well.

Click on the image above to see a sample video of the channel.

Next: Changing a news feed.