Best Climbing Newsy Site - Gripped?

I feel like Gripped is the best free newsy type climbing site right now.  Unless I'm missing something.

My. How far the mighty have fallen…

UKclimbing is the most consistently high quality reporting (at least among English language print sources). Somewhat UK centric as expected, but a reasonable amount of world news also. Plus following the weird UK scene is fun.

Nick Sweeney wrote:

Instagram

I like the climbing stuff on Instagram, but I feel like I miss big news.  Maybe I’m following too many individual climbers etc.

JCM wrote:

UKclimbing is the most consistently high quality reporting (at least among English language print sources). Somewhat UK centric as expected, but a reasonable amount of world news also. Plus following the weird UK scene is fun.

Good call, thanks!

I've been toying around with the idea of creating a climbing-focused news aggregator site, but a lot of sites nowadays don't publish RSS feeds, which makes the job harder.

JCM wrote:

UKclimbing is the most consistently high quality reporting (at least among English language print sources). Somewhat UK centric as expected, but a reasonable amount of world news also. Plus following the weird UK scene is fun.

I unironically love how much character (petty, quaint, crusty, quintessentially British) UKC comment section/forum has. There are still have people commenting "Chris Sharma is not a real climber coz he never climbs on gear" under random sports climbing news and get 10+ likes.

J L wrote:

I've been toying around with the idea of creating a climbing-focused news aggregator site, but a lot of sites nowadays don't publish RSS feeds, which makes the job harder.

That would be awesome.  I feel like there is room for that.

Stoked Weekend Warrior wrote:

I unironically love how much character (petty, quaint, crusty, quintessentially British) UKC comment section/forum has. There are still have people commenting "Chris Sharma is not a real climber coz he never climbs on gear" under random sports climbing news and get 10+ likes.

Ok, that's hilarious.

I have beef with Gripped. I used to put up with its usually same-old same-old, often poorly written boilerplate because it's climbing, and I love climbing. I wanted to believe, because it's like the closest thing we have to a local mag. But the daily onslaught of 'articles' indicates that their main goal is to have something anything new every day. But that's really social media's domain isn't it? 

The beef came when they 'reported' on my buddy's death a few days after it happened by quoting AI generated obituary spam and claimed a source (another friend) who never spoke to them. Meanwhile, we were right there, all grieving and partying and remembering in that following week and not one of Gripped's people ever reached out to us. It honestly would have been so meaningful and helpful if they had. We were shocked when we saw the travesty of an article, and when we called them out they became defensive but ultimately took the article down after several of us pushed.  Not what friends and family wanted to see and deal with in the immediate aftermath.

As a counterpoint, a decent time later, Delaney Miller from Climbing reached out to a mutual friend who worked with Michal on a new route, asking him if he would write an obituary for their "Climbers We Lost" segment because of what Michal represented as a climber and person. The honor of writing the piece was passed to me, and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that Delaney was sensitive and trustworthy when it came to handling our story and some part of a friend's legacy to our community. I have tremendous respect for how she and Climbing put together all of the obituaries; it was beautiful and healing to see everyone's grief together in one place, given plenty of time and space. That's what good reporting looks like. 

Mike J the Second wrote:

That would be awesome.  I feel like there is room for that.

Okay, I ended up doing it because I felt like there wasn't really a centralized place to find climbing news.

I used FetchRSS to convert a bunch of sites (Climbing.com, Climber.co.uk, UKC, Gripped, Weigh My Rack, IFSC, etc.) into RSS feeds and my site will periodically fetch new articles as they're published.

Let me know if you want to see additional sites. I notice AAC, Access Fund, and ClimbingZine are on the MP homepage, I'll look into adding those too.

J L wrote:

Okay, I ended up doing it because I felt like there wasn't really a centralized place to find climbing news.

I used FetchRSS to convert a bunch of sites (Climbing.com, Climber.co.uk, UKC, Gripped, Weigh My Rack, IFSC, etc.) into RSS feeds and my site will periodically fetch new articles as they're published.

Let me know if you want to see additional sites. I notice AAC, Access Fund, and ClimbingZine are on the MP homepage, I'll look into adding those too.

This is amazing.  Wow!  You already have enough to make it better than anything else out there.  Should we promote it on MP?  Sharing the link here in full form:

https://news.crag.social/

Thanks Mike. I'm lucky to work in the web dev industry so standing up something like this is well within my wheelhouse.

My main desire stemmed from just plain missing out on news like IFSC competitions. Oftentimes I'd only find out after it's recommended to me on YouTube, but the live stream had already ended, etc.

All the credit ultimately goes to the individual sites and authors who write the articles. I'm happy to be a facilitator/aggregator. (i.e. Climbing.com paywalls their articles after 5 free articles. I have no interest in circumventing that limitation since their business is not my business, etc.)

Since I find utility in this service I will keep it up and running for all to enjoy. Feel free to promote it as you wish!

Nicely done! This is an awesome resource. Thank you!

J L wrote:

Thanks Mike. I'm lucky to work in the web dev industry so standing up something like this is well within my wheelhouse.

My main desire stemmed from just plain missing out on news like IFSC competitions. Oftentimes I'd only find out after it's recommended to me on YouTube, but the live stream had already ended, etc.

All the credit ultimately goes to the individual sites and authors who write the articles. I'm happy to be a facilitator/aggregator. (i.e. Climbing.com paywalls their articles after 5 free articles. I have no interest in circumventing that limitation since their business is not my business, etc.)

Since I find utility in this service I will keep it up and running for all to enjoy. Feel free to promote it as you wish!

That is super kind of you!  Hope you could get something out of it though - maybe some Google Ads on the side at least?  Not sure how internet advertising works, just the first thing that came to mind.