I recently purchased NetNewsWire (an education discount is available if you qualify) and am pretty happy with it. I do wish that it included a built-in podcast player; I'm currently experimenting with using it to keep my podcast list synchronized between my laptop and desktop. I hated how both systems had an independent list in iTunes that I'd have to go through to find the ones I hadn't heard/watched yet. So far it seems to be working well, but they need to expand their iTunes integration to include videocasts.
All the syncing that I am doing is through the free year of NewsGator Online that they give you when you purchase the program. The .mac sync didn't seem to work quite right for me.