New and Better Ways to Find News

Posted on July 2, 2003

Finding news is what journalism is all about and the web keeps coming up with new and better tools to help you do just that. Its hard to keep up with all the latest developments, so here is a quick rundown of some of the hottest sites.

NEWS SEARCHES

Of course, the best tool is still Google News at news.google.com, with the widest selection (4,500 news sources) and highest precision. Formerly available only in English, Google News has now branched out into French, Italian, German and Spanish. Youll find links to these languages at the bottom of the main Google News page.

But there are new kids on the block worth looking at as well:

Newsblaster from Columbia University is the most promising (at http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster). The folks at Columbia have come up with a better way to search the news - instead of just a mish mash of headlines. Every night, the system crawls a series of Web sites, downloads articles, groups them together into "clusters" about the same topic, and summarizes each cluster. The end result is a Web page that gives you a sense of what the major stories of the day are, so you don't have to visit the pages of dozens of publications. You get story comparisons and the site also offers a timeline.

NewsInEssence (at www.newsinessence.com) is a similar "clustering" tool developed by the rival University of Michigan. It tries to find and summarizing clusters of related news articles from multiple sources on the Web, including the CBC, CNN, and the International Herald Tribune. You can create your own clusters as well.

Daypop (www.daypop.com) is trying to become the Google of blogs, those increasingly-popular web diaries. It offers you the choice of searching just for news, or just for blogs, or both. It also monitors hot words and trends in news papers and weblogs. (See other blog tools at www.journalismnet.com/blogs)

Sometimes, instead of search by keywords, you just want to know whats out there about a specific country, a health topic, an industry or even a company. IHaveNet.com gives you a chance to stroll through a library of topics, instead of restricting yourself to keywords. Select any one of dozens of categories and sub-categories on the left-hand side margin of this site, and you get instant news by topic.

SEE THE NEWSPAPERS

Nothing beats folding the pages of your favourite newspaper on your lap while sipping a cup of coffee. Web sites for newspapers are great, but you cant really see what the paper actually looks like. Two new sites give you a chance to do that on the web.

Todays Front Pages (at http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages) is brought to you by the folks at The Newseum, an American foundation. It provides a snazzy quick look at the front pages of more than 300 papers. A simple click also takes you to that papers website. The papers are organized in alphabetical order by country, but if you click on the link at the top labeled PAGE LIST you can select the world region as well.

PressDisplay at www.pressdisplay.com offers only a peek at the front pages for free. The rest you have to pay for. But you get 200 newspapers from 50 countries. You can also search by country or language. And the archives go back two weeks for most of the papers.

Both these sites give you a graphic display of the newspapers, but you cant search the newspapers for keywords and they only have a selection from various continents. So if you want to any newspaper website in the world -- and look at newspapers as they appear on the web, not in real life -- the two best tools are Paperboy and ABYZ.

Paperboy (at www.thepaperboy.com) allows you to search by city or town: Just put in the name of the town you want to search and you get a result, most of the time.

Lets say you come up empty or you want more than a town, you want to find many of the small papers in northern Alberta. Then try ABYZ Newspapers (at www.abyznewslinks.com) which allows you to find all the newspapers in a region, a country, and even a state or province.

NEWS ALERTS

Why not set up your own news clipping service? In previous columns, we looked at one of the best of these services -- Google News Alerts at www.google.com/newsalerts. For free, Google will send you an email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. You can ask for as many as you want and you can request they get sent once a day or as news happens.

Yahoo has a similar service at http://alerts.yahoo.com. You can type in any number of keywords and also narrow down the publications, though I have never found this service to be as efficient as Googles.

The major news organizations, of course, offer their own news alerts. The New York Times has now switched to a pay-for service, but its still free at CNN (at http://www.cnn.com/EMAIL/ ) and the BBC (at http://www.bbc.co.uk/email). The BBC has also recently launched a new desktop alert system. Once installed, an alert box will appear on your PC whenever an important story breaks. Its available for a free download at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3533099.stm.