If you're a news junkie who needs a daily or even hourly fix of the latest national and international happenings, read all about it: The daily news has moved onto the Web with a vengeance. Some of these resources have a relatively narrow audience, such as local newspapers, and many are essentially teasers for more extensive commercial services. But news hounds who don't want to pay or wade through the local newspaper still have plenty of opportunities. We focused on free sites that provide national and international news and are updated at least daily.
If you're willing to put up with a small bit of set-up hassle, take a look at The New York Times' TimesFax service, which provides the extensive national, international, and sports coverage you would expect from this venerable news institution. For paying subscribers, TimesFax dispenses daily news summaries, and this site is the entryway to the free general-interest version of that service. Before you can read this roundup, though, you must follow links to download the Adobe Acrobat portable document reader and configure your browser to use it. Once that's done, this service is impressive. You get eight pages of top stories and editorials. The stories are shorter than you'll find in the paper, but they are the lengthiest we saw. You even get the Times crossword puzzle! It isn't interactive like TIME Daily, and it doesn't have the sheer quantity of stories of USA Today's site, but for quality news reporting, the TimesFax service is difficult to beat.
The NandO Times is also a scaled-down free version of a commercial service. Operated by the News and Observer Corp., which owns this highly regarded daily newspaper in Charlotte, North Carolina, this site provides about the same breadth and depth of coverage as USA Today's. Like TIME Daily, this site provides photographs. However, much of the news is in dense blocks of text. Also, at virtually any time of the day, access to this site is slow. Even so, NandO Times is regularly updated during the day and is a good place to stop for a quick yet reasonably thorough news hit.
WWW WorldNews Today provides neither the quality of TIME Daily or TimesFax nor the quantity of USA Today. It does, however, carry a fair number of headlines and brief national, international, and sports stories. Laudably, it is the only on-line news site aside from TimesFax that includes editorials. They aren't barn-burning statements of opinion; they're more like tepid television news editorials. Nonetheless, it's refreshing to see on-line news sites trying to retain the best of traditional, printed newspapers.
There's nothing fancy about Internet MCI's News Summary. It is simply a regularly updated group of news, business, and sports headlines and brief summaries. You won't find photos, news analysis, or even a lot of stories. But if you are in a hurry and want the top stories, look here: This site is easy to get to and easy to navigate.
UTTMlink is a byproduct of CBS News Up to the Minute, the overnight news show. It provides a quick and easy way to get your updated morning news. Typically, CBS updates the headlines in the middle of the night, but there aren't very many of them and the level of detail isn't extensive. Navigation can be funky: CBS maintains a UTTM home page with features and other interesting information. However, you can't easily get directly to this page from the home page.
While we only looked at resources of national and international interest, many local newspapers also have on-line editions. A good place to look for them is MediaInfo Interactive. This is a remarkably thorough set of links, detailing 103 American dailies and a similar number of international newspapers in a recent count.
by David Haskin