Wikinews, a free newspaper project of the Wikimedia Foundation, has introduced the Wikinews Print Edition Podcast. The podcast is a newsfeed that lets users subscribe to WikiNews and have a PDF version of the newspaper delivered each day.

Wikinews is produced by a group of volunteer journalists whose mission is “to create a diverse community where citizens from around the globe (including you) can collaborate to report the news on a wide variety of current events.”

Make’s Phillip Torrone has previously documented distributing PDFs via podcast feeds. This process hasn’t caught on yet, probably because most mainstream media players still aren’t that usable for reading PDF files.

Another stumbling block is usability issues with iTunes. Few users are likely to look for free newspaper PDF downloads in an online music store.

Any type of file can be delivered via an RSS 2.0 feed, as long as the client application can support it. Podcast subscribers should use the same caution when using files downloaded via a podcast as they would with other files downloaded directly from the Internet.

via Steve Rubel