Broadway News App
Broadway news isn’t hard to find. The problem is that it’s scattered everywhere. So I built one place where it all comes to me… and you can too in five minutes.
Broadway news is hard to keep up with
Playbill publishes something. BroadwayWorld has something else. Deadline reports a casting announcement. Variety covers the business side. The New York Times reviews a show. Broadway News breaks a story. And somewhere between all of those tabs, newsletters, Instagram posts, and push notifications, you’re supposed to somehow stay informed.
I got tired of that system, so I built a better one.
Not an actual app, exactly. I built my own personalized Broadway news feed using RSS. It takes a few minutes to set up, costs nothing, and now almost every piece of Broadway news I care about arrives in one place automatically.
And I genuinely like it better than Apple News.
Stop searching for news
The basic problem with the way most of us consume industry news is that we’re constantly going looking for it.
You remember to visit Playbill. You scroll BroadwayWorld. You see something from Deadline because somebody happened to repost it on Instagram. Maybe an article from Variety gets pushed to you. Maybe it doesn’t.
That means your information diet is partly determined by memory and partly determined by algorithms.
Neither is particularly reliable.
The alternative is simple: instead of going to the publications, make the publications come to you.
That’s what RSS does.
RSS is much less complicated than it sounds
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which somehow makes the whole thing sound more complicated instead of less.
Think of an RSS feed as a pipe. When a website publishes a new article, that article can automatically travel through the pipe into an app called an RSS reader.
Add ten websites, and now ten publications are flowing into the same place.
No searching. No refreshing ten homepages. No hoping Instagram happens to show you the story.
The publications publish. Your reader collects. That’s it.
Build your own Broadway news app
I use an app called Unread as my RSS reader.
Inside it, I added feeds from the major Broadway and entertainment publications I want to follow.
Now when those publications release something new, it appears automatically in my feed.
The experience feels surprisingly close to having a custom news app built specifically for Broadway. Except I get to decide what belongs in it.
A traditional news app is trying to predict what you’ll click on. An RSS reader is simply delivering what you explicitly asked to receive.
One is algorithmic curation. The other is intentional curation.
Start with Broadway Briefing
There is one resource I’d still recommend before you build any of this: Broadway Briefing.
It’s free, arrives in your inbox every morning, and gives you a quick snapshot of what’s happening across the industry.
For a lot of people, that may be enough.
But I wanted something different from a once-a-day summary. I wanted a feed I could open whenever I had a few minutes and see what had been published since I last checked.
That’s where the RSS setup became useful.
Broadway Briefing gives me the morning overview. My RSS reader gives me the ongoing stream.
Your feed doesn’t have to stop at Broadway
This is where the system becomes much more useful than simply bookmarking theatre websites.
RSS isn’t a Broadway tool. It’s an information tool.
Any publication, blog, organization, or website that offers an RSS feed can potentially become part of your reader.
That means you can build different information systems around the areas of the industry you actually care about.
Maybe yours includes theatre news, casting publications, regional theatres, entertainment business reporting, vocal pedagogy blogs, choreography publications, or technology resources.
A director’s feed might look different from an actor’s. A musical director’s might look different from a choreographer’s. That’s the point.
You’re not subscribing to somebody else’s definition of what matters. You’re designing your own.
Being informed is part of being in the industry
I don’t think actors need to become Broadway news obsessives. Knowing every casting announcement will not make you a better actor.
But there’s a difference between obsessing over the industry and understanding the industry you’re trying to work in.
Paying attention helps you notice patterns.
What kinds of shows are getting produced?
Which projects are moving from regional theatres toward New York?
Who keeps working together?
Which directors, choreographers, writers, producers, and casting offices are attached to which projects?
What shows are closing?
What’s transferring?
What trends keep appearing?
Individual headlines are just headlines. Over time, though, they begin to form a picture of the business around you.
That context changes the conversations you can have and the questions you know to ask.
Build an information system, not an information habit
There’s an important difference between occasionally remembering to “check Broadway news” and having a system that keeps you informed.
Habits require you to remember. Systems remove that requirement.
Once your RSS feeds are set up, they keep working. New articles arrive whether you remember to check Playbill that morning or not. When you have five minutes, the information is waiting for you.
That’s the part I find useful.
The goal isn’t to consume more information. It’s to make the information you actually value easier to access.
Download my free 5-minute guide
I’ve put together a complete setup walkthrough that you can download here for free. You will also need my Broadway Feed Pack to breeze through the process of adding all the feeds I use.
It contains all the exact RSS links I use, the apps I recommend, and everything you’ll need. You can build the whole thing in a few minutes and then customize it around whatever corners of the industry matter most to you.
🥜 In a Nutshell
Don’t let an algorithm decide how informed you are about your own industry. Build a simple system that brings the sources you trust directly to you.
