News on the Web
Steven M. Cohen
I am addicted to the news. I admit it. They say that the first step towards recovery is admitting that there is a problem. The temptations are everywhere: on television, in the newspapers, on the radio, and especially on the Web. Not only is the daily news provided for me through well-organized Web sites, but I also have the opportunity to have newsworthy items that are of interest to me sent to me via e-mail. In order to dig up as much news as possible in the least amount of time, I have bookmarked eight sites that help to ease the process.
1st Headlines (www.1stheadlines.com) is the first stop on my news trek every morning. One of this site’s many useful features is its display of the most current headlines in the middle of the site, with the source of the story underneath. Clicking on the link will open up a new browser containing the article. Current topics are listed on the lefthand side along with subject headings, metro news, United States politics, and international news. The strongest feature is the search option. I always enjoy searching for “library” or “librarian” and reading interesting news stories from all around the world.
Another one of my favorites is World News (www.worldnews.com). This portal is very busy, with many options to explore, but I usually jump directly to the powerful search engine. After typing in a query, the site displays the twenty-five most current results. The next twenty-five results can then be viewed if desired. I sometimes feel as if this site can predict the future because the next day’s news shows up at times (looking closely, one can see that this is news from another time zone). This site is useful for those who remember seeing an article within the past week but can’t remember where or when.
Moreover (www.moreover.com) is a news source plus a tool for webmasters who want to provide news to their readers without having to do any research. Dynamic and subject-specific news can be automatically placed for free on any Web site. Moreover’s news portal has many options available, including the most current headlines, a search interface, and more than seven hundred news categories to peruse through. In addition, Moreover will e-mail users news of particular interest that fall within the categories specified by the user.
Ease of use has made Researchville (www.researchville.com) one of the most popular news engines available on the Web. By searching either Today’s News, News Wires, General News, Newspapers, Business News, or Tech News, the user can perform a search on multiple news engines at once. After a query is performed, Researchville provides links to each source with the search term already embedded into the URL. Clicking on the link brings up the search results of each engine.
Searching for news can be fun, but sometimes there are hidden news items that these engines cannot find. Links directly to newspapers can be very helpful, especially when one is searching for reputable information from a particular geographic area or that elusive article from a local paper.
The American Journalism Review (http://ajr.newslink.org) provides an enormous list of newspapers, magazines, and radio/television Web sites. The newspapers portion is divided up into many categories, including United States, Full Service, Partial Service, the Americas, Other Continents, and Campus Newspapers. In addition, the user can type in a city and state and newspapers of that region will be displayed. The magazine section is indexed by relevant content matter, and the radio/television section can be searched by city/state or call letters.
Another wonderfully categorized portal of international newspaper links is Abyz News Links (www.abyznewslinks.com). The site is easy to maneuver through and users can choose to browse by region or country. Once the general location is chosen, the categories are further broken down into geographic areas within that country or region. Delving further into the categories, a list of newspapers is then displayed with links to their sites. Since many of the sites are not in English, code words are listed next to each newspaper that will help the user decipher the language in which the newspaper is written.
For those only interested in news on the national front, take a look at the news portion of 50 States (www.50states.com/news), which purports to have more than 3,000 United States newspapers in its directory. Clicking on a state will list the newspapers in alphabetical order, and the town or city in parenthesis. This is definitely not an exhaustive listing, but its ease of use warrants mention.
Popular portals like Yahoo! also provide current and breaking news through their cooperation with news sources such as Associated Press and Reuters. Yahoo’s Daily News (http://dailynews.yahoo.com) is divided into topics including Top Stories, Business, Entertainment, Politics, World, and Sports. The site is searchable by stories, photos, and full coverage. Yahoo’s full coverage is a one-stop resource for recent stories and Web sites on a variety of newsworthy topics. An example of full coverage information on the 2000 elections can be found at http://dailynews.yahoo.com/fc/US/US_Elections.
The news can be a wonderful resource for public librarians to use to serve their constituency. For those libraries that don’t have access to current event databases that contain news items, look no further than the Web sites mentioned here. Searching for news items on the popular search engine databases will pull up outdated stories, as engines do not update their indexes every day, and in libraries, we need to provide the most current information available.