Audio RSS feed

An RSS feed is an XML file, updated automatically, that lists a site's latest published content with its metadata: title, date, description, link. An audio RSS feed adds one element, the enclosure: the audio file of each episode. This long-standardised format is what the entire podcast ecosystem runs on.

One standard, two roles

In an audio publishing pipeline, RSS appears twice, in opposite directions.

On the way in, first: the news site's own RSS feed, the one listing published articles, serves as an ingestion channel. An audio platform watches it, detects each new article as it is published, and generates the audio version, with zero change to the newsroom's habits. It is the most universal integration route: every CMS produces RSS, and the WeDispatch RSS feed connection relies on this principle for sites that want neither a plugin nor development work. For finer control (article selection, richer metadata), the CMS API takes over.

On the way out, second: the audio RSS feed generated by the platform, listing the produced episodes, is the format consumed by Spotify, Apple Podcasts and every listening app. Registering that feed once with the platforms is enough; each new episode then appears automatically. This is the mechanism that makes an automatic podcast possible.

Why the standard still matters

RSS has the elegance of open standards: no platform controls it, no account is needed to read it, and a feed published once can be consumed by every player in the ecosystem. For a publisher, that means an audio pipeline without exclusive dependency: if a platform changes its rules tomorrow, the feed still belongs to the publisher.