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News


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.

The Best

If you need news that's fresh every hour, TIME Daily won't satisfy you. TIME updates this site in the evening, so it doesn't provide the up-to-the-minute stories that true news junkies require. Nor does TIME Daily have much coverage of sports and weather unless those items are breaking stories like the Super Bowl or a hurricane. But it is a more interactive and powerful use of the Web than any other news-related site we've seen. It includes about a dozen top stories each day, some of which have accompanying photos. The stories aren't as long as they wind up being in the printed magazine, but they are longer than those carried by most of the other news sites we saw. TIME Daily also provides a level of interactivity and depth that no other site matches. Most stories have links to recent, related stories published in the magazine. At the end of each story is a text search box that contains a key word or phrase from the story. You can use it or add your own to search for additional stories.

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 Rest

The USA Today site bests TIME Daily and TimesFax in both quantity and timeliness. It contains roughly twice as many news stories as TimesFax and TIME Daily and is updated regularly throughout the day. (The others are updated only once a day.) It also provides highlights from each of the newspaper's regular sections, including Sports, Lifeline, Money, and Weather. You won't get the depth of coverage you'll find at the two preceding sites; while there are many stories, they are short. Nor are there links to other stories or the ability to search back issues as provided by TIME Daily. Like many of the other free services in this review, this site is a teaser to persuade you to subscribe to a more comprehensive, fee-based service. Still, for a quick hit of headlines, this is a great place to come.

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

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Copyright (c) 1995 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company is prohibited. Internet Life and the Internet Life logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

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Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995