How To Find News Online

One way that many people find news is to use their favorite portal as their home page. The major portals all have customizable news sections. Or you could use a network news site like CNN.com as your home page.

Old news stories are bit harder to find. BBC has international news archives going back to 1997. For local news, check to see if the online version of your local paper has searchable archives. Topix.net has archives that go back a year.

News Search Engines and Directories:

§ http://www.kidon.com/media-link: Can browse almost 20,000 media sites by continent and country. Has search page to filter by type of media, location, language, etc.

§ http://www.abyznewslinks.com: Mostly newspapers, but some other types of news media can be searched. Can search by country.

§ http://www.einnews.com: Indexes business-related news from all over the world.

§ http://www.newswealth.com: Indexes news from magazines, columnists, blogs, cartoons, celebrity gossip, sports, business, weather, live cams, lottery results, and some newspapers.

§ http://www.newsinpictures.com: Collection of links to “photos of the day” or “news in pictures” pages of more than 100 news sites. Links are browsable by category.

§ http://news.google.com: Can find news on Google minutes after it appears on original source. Items retained on database for 30 days. Unlike with regular Google, there are no cached copies of news pages. Has archive search to find older news on the Internet.

§ http://news.yahoo.com: Covers over 7,000 news sources. Has news “partners” (e.g., USA Today, Reuters, AP, Washington Post, LA Times, US News & World Report, etc.) that feed news directly to Yahoo! and provide some original content for Yahoo! Yahoo! offers other features like news feeds, news alerts, links to related stories, links to e-mail a story to someone, etc.

§ http://www.topix.net: Indexes more than 10,000 news sources. Detailed organization. Can browse by 30,000 U.S. cities, and topix will pull in news stories for you that are relevant to that town. Alerts and feeds for any U.S. zip code. One year of archives.

§ http://newsnow.co.uk: A British site that indexes from 22,000 different sources. Updates every 5 minutes.

§ http://wn.com: Indexes more than 1,000 sites by country, industry, region, etc.

§ http://www.cagle.com: Daryl Cagle’s Professional Cartoonists Index: browsable and searchable, plus political cartoons from more than 100 cartoonists dating back to 2001.

Networks/Wire Services Online: These are the online versions of TV networks (e.g., CNN) or wire services (e.g., Reuters):

§ http://news.bbc.co.uk: Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook says: “A large portion of searchers throughout the world consider BBC the best news site on the Internet. It is particularly noted for its international coverage….All content comes from BBC writers, though they may use other sources such as Reuters in writing their stories.” Archives go back to 1997.

§ http://www.cnn.com: Extreme Searcher’s Internet Handbook says that CNN.com “…has been displaying an increasingly international perspective, partly in connection with CNN’s strong presence on European TV….The site is particularly rich in video.” The site is customizable. You can download audio news to an MP3 player, get a desktop news ticker, etc.

§ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/: This site has a flyout menu for browsing through headlines by category and subcategory. It gets stories from local NBC stations, AP, Newsweek, etc. Most stories are available online for a few weeks, some for many months. U.S. users can customize the site by entering a zip code to get local news, weather, and sports. There are RSS and podcast feed options, including RSS feed for any specific search you have done.

§ http://www.reuters.com: This site carries content from 2,000+ Reuters journalists around the world. The search bar lets you search by company, stock symbol, or keyword for news related to what you typed. Archives go back to 2006.

§ http://english.aljazeera.net: The content on site is aimed at the Arab world, from Arab perspective. It has news, economy, culture, sci-tech, special reports, polls.

Newspapers Online: These are easier to search than their corresponding print versions, and most have archives of a few days, months, or even several years. (If you want archives from long ago, ask a librarian at a local public library to help you. They may provide services such as Dialog and LexisNexis to find old news articles). Some online newspaper equivalents are updated frequently, even more frequently than print counterparts.

§ http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages: This site allows you to see snapshots of the actual front pages of 336 newspapers from 43 countries. Their search bar doesn’t work: you must browse the list.

§ http://www.pressdisplay.com: Same as above, but if you pay a fee, you can see all of the pages of the paper.

§ http://newslink.org/MAnews.html: This is a directory of online newspapers in Massachusetts. See http://newslink.org to find newspapers in other states as well. Can take a while for page to load.

§ If you want to find a specific newspaper online that is not listed in one of the above search engines, you can try typing the name of the newspaper with a .com after it. Most newspapers do have a corresponding online version.

Directories of Radio & TV Stations Online:

§ http://www.radio-locator.com: This site has links to 10,000+ radio station sites (and 2,500 audio streams) worldwide. It lets you search by country, U.S. state or zip code, Canadian province, call letters, or format (rock, classical, etc.).

§ http://www.radiostationworld.com: This is a directory of thousands of radio stations worldwide, organized by continent, country, and type of station.

§ http://www.npr.org: This site provides access to National Public Radio stations throughout U.S., a searchable audio archives of NPR stories, and a transcript ordering service. You can also get schedules for individual programs.

Other:

§ Patch.com: Patch is a great local news source web site. Browse the U.S. map to find your town and get original content from Patch’s editors: http://www.patch.com.

§ Blogs: Many blogs cover news, with opinion/discussion added. http://www.technorati.com is probably the top blog search engine.