Re: Track online press coverage

From: Tara Calishain <calumet_at_Mindspring.com>
Date: Wed 13 Mar 2002 19:07:59 -0600

At 02:58 PM 3/13/2002, you wrote:
>Tara, I need some URLs to find, say, the top 5 online
>news sources. I know of a few free news feeds
>(moreover.com and energynews live), but any you
>could ad would be great. Love that push content!

The top sources are really going to depend on what
you're looking for, but here are a few general
thoughts.

If you're looking for topical news, consider using
RSS feeds and a reader. Directories of feeds are
available at http://www.newsisfree.com and
http://www.syndic8.com/ . A good RSS reader is
AmphetaDesk ( http://www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/ )
which is free. Using AmphetaDesk I can gather the
latest headlines from 275 sites in about 10-15
minutes (I'm on dialup.)

If you're looking for news based on specific keywords,
I'd say the top searches are:

1) Northern Light News -- http://www.northernlight.com/news.html
     -- Also provides updates via e-mail. I find this
        site has the best coverage of press releases.

2) Yahoo Daily News -- http://dailynews.yahoo.com/
      -- Also provides updates via e-mail. Coverage is so-so but
         there's some special syntax searching you can do here.

3) AlltheWeb News Search -- http://www.alltheweb.com/search?cat=news
      -- Great coverage, especially of small and local papers.

4) RocketNews -- http://www.rocketnews.com/ --
      Allows you to search for news between 0 and 5 days old.
      Thousands of sources; I used to ding them because they
      didn't accept phrase searches but they appear to have
      fixed that.

5) DayPop -- http://www.daypop.com -- Over 6000 sources. You
      can search mainstream media news, Web logs, or those
      RSS headlines I was talking about in the beginning of
      this post.

(There are some good cost services out there too that monitor
news and are oriented toward the solo/small biz researcher.
But I'm not getting into that here or this post would be 5K
words long. Nor will I get into vertical pub monitoring, etc.)

Now, how to monitor all these sites. Some of them offer
e-mail news alerts, and if you set up a couple of filters
in your mail program you can accommodate the alerts without
jamming your inbox. For Web-only resources, there are
programs that you can set up to automatically monitor
bookmarks. If I wanted to monitor Daypop for the word
"segway," for example, I can run a search:

http://www.daypop.com/search?q=segway&search=Search&t=a&min=0&max=24&c=50&ln=all&lc=all

And then monitor this URL for changes. Some sources I find
very useful and don't care to monitor; I just want to make
sure to look at them every day. For those I have a simple
perl script that downloads one page into a bookmarked folder.

Anyway, I'm rattling on. This is only a brief scrape at the
topic, but it might give you some ideas.

Hope this helps,

Tara

Tara Calishain / tara_at_researchbuzz.com
----
ResearchBuzz -- Search engine, database,
and online collection news since 1998!
http://www.researchbuzz.com







Received on Wed Mar 13 2002 - 19:07:59 CST