DATABASE Magazine

News Resources on the World Wide Web

by Greg R. Notess
Montana State University

Business news, current events, politics, and sports are the kinds of information that fit well into the online world, where they can be updated as frequently as necessary. Newspapers come out once a day; TV and radio broadcast news at predetermined intervals. While major events sometimes will receive immediate reporting in the traditional media, the Internet makes it possible for the public to choose when and what news they want to read.

[express stop] A few years back, if I had been asked to predict whether newswire reports and reporting from around the world would be freely available on the Internet, I would have guessed that it would only be available by paid subscription. Clarinet was already delivering news electronically over Usenet news feeds in the clari.* hierarchy, but the company required that the Internet access providers pay for Clarinet subscriptions and only make it available to the access provider's customers. Other subscription-based services were starting up as counterparts to print publications. It seemed unlikely that newswires or newspapers could find a way to offer free access to the day's events and yet maintain their economic viability. The economic question takes time to answer, but the news business is certainly offering a great deal of its daily information for free. Stories from the Associated Press, Reuters, and dozens of other sources are freely accessible on the Net with weekly, daily, and even more frequent updates.

NANDO TIMES

One popular electronic newspaper providing world and national news goes by the name of the NandO Times. The name NandO comes from News and Observer, the Raleigh, North Carolina newspaper that is publishing the NandO Times. The free NandO Times derives its material from a number of sources, including the Associated Press, Reuters, Cox News Service, and other wire services. Supported in part by advertising, NandO also has a subscription version, NandO News Network, that offers additional resources: "our searchable news & magazine archives and access to over 100 news & feature columns not available online anywhere else."

The main entry page for the NandO Times, http://www2.nando.net/nt/nando.cgi, is shown in Figure 1. The four main categories of news are available on the top of the screen: World, Nation, Sports, and Politics. Under each of these main categories is a feature article, a news summary, a couple color images with captions, and a list of about a dozen other articles. In a table underneath the four main categories is a box with one feature story, another box with links to some advertisements, a date stamp, and links to eight other categories: Business, InfoTech, Entertainment, Voices, Something Else, Health & Science, Sports Server, and In the Press Box. The information technology category covers news in the telecommunications, computer, and electronics industries, and it is the only one with archived news reports available back to June 1995. All the other categories include only the most recent day's news. "Voices" features columnists espousing their various views, while the "In the Press Box" showcases sports columnists.

Each category lists recent articles with a headline and the first few lines of the article. This format enables easy browsing of the list. Selecting the headline brings up the full text of the article, in HTML, along with copyright statements from the News and Observer and the originating news source. With the handful of articles in each category, this format works well for browsing and navigation. A small improvement would be to add a navigation bar at the top and bottom of the pages containing the articles. Other than a possible hypertext link to a copyright statement, the only way out of an article is to use the browser's backup key to return to the title listing.

OTHER AP SOURCES

Like the NandO Times, other online newspapers provide access to Associated Press stories in combination with reports from other wire services and from local reports. From Casper, Wyoming comes Trib.com (http://www.trib.com/), which features 10 to 20 AP stories of the day in the categories of General, Foreign, Finance, Washington, Politics, Mountain States, Sports, and Weather. The stories are available in reverse chronological order. Unfortunately, the titles are strange conglomerates of filenames based on headlines. For example, Washington_Proposal_to_Expand_. html is the only information given for an article describing an initiative on Washington state's ballot about American Indian tribal gambling operations. This contrasts sharply with the NandO Times' more detailed descriptions and easy navigation menus.

TRIBweb, from the Tacoma News Tribune (TNT) of Tacoma, Washington (http://www.tribnet.com/), takes yet another approach. TRIBweb features stories from a variety of news wires, including the Associated Press, and it has much more detailed options for local and regional news. While the interface is not as intuitive as is the NandO Times, TRIBweb does provide full headlines of articles. Of even greater utility to an information seeker, TRIBweb houses the stories on its server longer. It is only a week to ten days' worth, but that is a significant improvement over the single-day coverage found on Trib.com and the NandO Times.

REUTERS

As one of the major newswires, Reuters has its own Web site at http://www.reutersnm.com/. While this has some interesting links to information about Reuters itself, its products, and some of its more specialized offerings, it is not the best place to go for recent Reuters news stories. For wire reports, Yahoo, that ubiquitous and incredibly useful Internet directory, is the source. Yahoo continues to remain primarily a categorized directory of Net resources. However, they have recently expanded their information value by adding news briefs and stories from Reuters. The top Yahoo page includes the [Xtra!] tag after certain categories, which link directly to the news resources. Direct access to all the Reuters reports on Yahoo is at http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/. The day's news is divided into Top Stories, World, Business, Politics, Sports, and Entertainment listings. While not as extensive in coverage as the Internet newspapers mentioned earlier, the Yahoo Reuters feed can be a quick source for current reporting.

Reuters is also the source for infoMCI news summaries. These summaries are updated three times a day and include National News, Business, Sports, Entertainment, and Politics. InfoMCI is available from internetMCI at http://www.fyionline.com/infoMCI/. In addition to the Reuters reports, infoMCI offers MCI's own daily industry profile news reports in the telecommunications, computers, science & technology, retail, healthcare, and services industries.

UP-TO-THE-MINUTE NEWS

The interactive and online potential of the Internet makes up-to-the-minute news reporting even more readily available than it can be on television. Online commercial services have offered constantly updated databases for a number of years, and their use has demonstrated the attraction of online news sources. Now, Internet users have access to a number of sites that provide some of this up-to-the-minute reporting. Sports news resources and stock quote sites demonstrate the way online reporting can be done on the Web.

Sports news is as popular online as off, and most of the other resources mentioned here include at least a section devoted to sports. However, ESPNet SportsZone, http://espnet.sportszone.com/, delivers the most detailed and timely information. Besides being an attractive, well designed site, the SportsZone bolsters current sports news with detailed statistics, such as rankings, game recaps, scores, and schedules for upcoming events. But the feature that truly sets this online sporting news database apart is its frequent updates. Even while a game is being played, check the scoreboard sections of SportsZone for the current score. Reload the page for an updated score.

For the casual stock market watcher or the serious investor, a number of sites offer free 15-minute delayed stock quotes. A site such as Money Quick Quotes at http://www.pathfinder.com/money/quote/qc makes it easy to quickly check the latest on specific stocks. Access is by ticker symbol, and there is a ticker symbol look-up feature. Data reported include the usual data and the date and time of the last update. Other stock quote sites can be found on Yahoo.

NEW YORK TIMES AND MULTIMEDIA

How many people would love to see an electronic New York Times freely accessible on the Net? While the full version is not yet there, TimesFax, an eight-page excerpt from the New York Times, can be found at http://nytimesfax.com/. Rather than presenting the text of articles in HTML or ASCII text, TimesFax is disseminated as an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file. To see the file, Adobe's free Acrobat viewer must be installed first. The basic conversion of the fax version of the Times to PDF format seems to work well, and its eight pages of news pack in more information than the brief Yahoo headlines. However, the time required for downloading the PDF file, the necessity of downloading and installing Acrobat, and the need to learn how to maneuver within Acrobat combine to create a strong disincentive to reading this resource when compared to the relative ease of pulling up HTML information on other sites. As the Acrobat reader becomes more integrated into Web browsers, as Netscape is planning to do, this kind of dissemination may become more common.

With the RealAudio player (http:// www.realaudio.com), radio news reports can be downloaded and played in near real-time. Like using Adobe Acrobat files, RealAudio must be installed on a system before use. After installation, visit the RealAudio home page for links to radio programs from ABC and National Public Radio (NPR). The ABC site includes hourly updated broadcasts. NPR features All Things Considered and Morning Edition from the previous day. Ever have a patron tell you they heard a portion of an All Things Considered report on the way home from work, and can you please find out more about it? With RealAudio you can listen to the relevant portions of the broadcast yourself.

The audio broadcasts have many shortcomings. The sound quality reminds me of that of early radios. Plenty of desktop systems do not have high quality sound cards (if they have one at all) and audio software. RealAudio does not work on TIA pseudo-SLIP connections. And like so many of these news sites, an archive of past broadcasts is unavailable.

CNN Interactive, the WWW site for the Cable News Network, (http://www.cnn.com) includes recent, top news stories and video clips in QuickTime format (which includes sound). CNN also has just straight sound files. For example, when CNN posts the latest Billboard Top Ten list, it also has hot links to a graphic of the cover and sound clips of the song (in .aiff and .wav formats). In addition to its multimedia offerings, the CNN news stories tend to have more graphics than some of the other sites, and the images, sound files, and QuickTime movies are directly accessible from the HTML text of the story. Another useful feature of the CNN site is the cross references provided at the bottom of stories. The cross references have links to related stories, often older stories still available on the server, and to related Web sites.

CNN demonstrates the possibilities of news delivery on the Internet. An article on Kirgizstan includes small inline images of the region. Another image links to a larger map showing the location of the country. There is a sound clip of a recent speech by the Kirgiz president. At the bottom, hot links connect to earlier stories on Kirgiz and to entries on Kirgizstan and surrounding countries from the latest CIA World Factbook. CNN Interactive does not include very many stories under each of its categories, but it does present the news using a full panoply of multimedia tools.

CNN Interactive also retains older stories. While there is no easy direct access to the older materials by date, links from recent stories and the search option provide access. Unlike many Internet sites, CNN's search interface supports Boolean searching. At this point, there is only about a month's worth of archival material, and the search results are limited to 20 hits. Thus, CNN Interactive does better than many of the other sites in providing access to news older than yesterday, but it is by no means a comprehensive database of news reports.

LOCAL AND REGIONAL NEWS

Hundreds of newspapers and other players in the news business have moved to using the Web to disseminate at least a portion of their daily news. Only a few can be listed here, but there are plenty of online databases of Internet news sources. As with many resources on the Net, electronic daily news is not just available in the United States. Numerous papers and sites in other countries offer local reports. Select Ware's Complete News Links at http://www.inch.com/~select/pages/news-e.html includes links to free news resources all over the globe. Notes on the list include language used, if it is other than English, and sometimes short descriptions regarding scope. The list is arranged alphabetically by country, and by state within the United States. This geographic arrangement enables users to focus in on specific regional news sources.

An even more comprehensive list, with more than 1,800 unique resources, is NewsLink. Located at http://www. newslink.org/, NewsLink features newspapers, broadcast media, magazines, and surveys. Within those different categories, broad geographic categories are combined with alphabetical listings for access. Both lists could benefit from a forms-based keyword search option. Browsing through either of these lists demonstrates the breadth of resources available, but do not forget to examine a few of the resources to see how detailed the coverage is in a particular area.

[express stop] Despite their many features and their utility for keeping up with the latest news, most of these WWW news resources do not even come close to replacing commercial online news databases. The huge advantage that NewsNet, NEXIS, Dow Jones, and Dialog offer is depth of coverage. At best, these free Internet resources give a week's retrospective. At most, they cover a couple dozen stories in a specific subject area. By comparison, the commercial online services include thousands of new articles each day and have years' worth of past files instantly available. Also missing from the free Internet resources is the full range of a commercial online service's search tools, such as field searching, limiting, and complex nested Boolean and adjacency queries.

Given these cautions, which are the best news sources that can deliver the news required for individual information needs? As always, the Net changes so quickly that these recommendations may not be valid tomorrow, but try Yahoo for quick access to brief articles of broad interest. The NandO Times offers more variety and in-depth articles and an archive of information technology pieces. Use ESPNet for sports, Money Quick Quotes for stock quotes, and CNN Interactive for multimedia news. For local news, look in the news indexes for regional resources. The world of cybernews replaces neither the commercial databases nor the newsprint versions, but it does provide a welcome supplement to the traditional media outlets.

Communications to the author should be addressed to Greg R. Notess, Montana State University Libraries, Bozeman, MT 59717-0332; 406/994-6563; Internet-- greg@notess.com ; http://www.notess.com.