[nijave]

I think lart of the problem is RSS is sort of orthogonal to hyper targeted marketing and tracking.

With email, you can track who reads the mail, how often, what times, etc. You can tailor recommendations and content to the specific person

RSS is just a generic feed that's the same for everyone. Great for consumers--less useful for people trying to optimize monetization

[hombre_fatal]

You don't even need to get cynical.

Implementing RSS is extra work, thus not everyone is going to implement it. Even if it contributed to the bottom line. It's the same reason every website that publishes information doesn't have an email newsletter.

Since it's a consumption optimization, it makes sense for us, those who may want to consume a given website, to implement it (while we wait around for utopia).

[bccdee]

RSS is easy to add to a website. It's a ubiquitous standard — whatever language or framework you're using has a library or plugin that you can integrate in under an hour.

[nijave]

I wouldn't say cynical so much as pointing out it just doesn't make much business sense to add.

[webmaven]

Keep in mind the example the OP is using; a profit motive doesn't need to exist, the motivation is simply informing the public. If you go to the trouble of creating a website for that purpose, there isn't really any excuse for not including an RSS or Atom feed unless you're somehow still stuck in the "edit pages by hand and upload with FTP" era, or perhaps (I'm being extremely charitable here) if you're stuck in the slightly later "I had to write my own CMS from scratch" or "I'm still using Microsoft Frontpage" era.