Sports Illustrated drops the ball with lackluster RSS feeds

I mentioned previously how I prefer to read an entire article in Google Reader or LiteFeeds, my two primary RSS aggregator applications. Whether I'm at my desktop, on the move or on my phone, I don't want to be traversing the Web to read the content I so desperately seek. I just subscribed to Sports Illustrated's RSS feed and was really disappointed at the contents of each item description: "Read full story for latest details". Columnist contributions have a brief abstract, but news items implement the default message.

ESPN's feeds are a bit better, using a single sentence to describe the contained content. But it's still not enough. I need an snapshot or teaser, not a subtitle. SI's world-reknown for its stellar writing...the least they could do it give me a snippet or truncated portion of the piece.

Look, I realize that most enterprise-level, corporate publishing concerns are still of the Web 1.0 mentality that driving users to their public WWW property is the main concern, to retain ad exposures. Many have only adopted RSS in the last few months, so I'll give them a pass. But this is ridiculous. That's fine and a in all likelihood I'll do that anyway if the article's intriguing. IF. But don't force me to do so just to determine such attractiveness. Doing so largely defeats the purpose of having a syndicated feed in the first place.

SI, an institution I've respected for decades as a young writer and now as a professional journalist, totally let me down this time.