18 News - Searching Specific Formats part 2 (Information Research)
Description
This article is from the Information Research FAQ, by David Novak david@spireproject.com with numerous contributions by others.
18 News - Searching Specific Formats part 2 (Information Research)
Conclusion
News articles are typically light and biased. The sheer quantity of
news in the large news databases make this a useful resource to fall
back for any tightly focused research topic. I once discovered an
obscure scientist working in a unique field from a small 3 paragraph
article in a local farmer's newspaper in England (Global Textline
Database).
Newswires and News Databases are just two elements of a large industry
which extends to the your local newspaper and to further specialty
databases. Most newspapers maintain their own local news database, and
some make this available electronically. A manual clipping services may
also be the option - certain firms manually page through local papers
looking for advertisements or articles.
While on the topic, certain newswires like Business Wire and PR
Newswire essentially distribute certain types of news for money. Yes,
anything in these newswires is there because the company paid for it to
be there - $500 and up most likely. Other newswires earn money in the
reverse process: from the media who read or publish their work.
Associated Press or Reuters are created from news organizations. Others
like Voice of America (VOA) are alternatively funded, but with
reasonable reliability.
There are also a range of focused newswires such as Newsbyte (computer
issues), PR Newswire (product releases), and Middle Eastern newswires.
Further newswires can be found at Yahoo.
Strategy
I can think of four ways to use this information for research:
1) As an alternative to your evening news or morning newspaper. Online
news is available 24 hours a day, in more detail, from respected news
organizations.
2) Search past news to locate information unlikely to emerge in
journals or magazines. News includes a great deal of local detail and
personal information unlikely to be found elsewhere.
3) As a historical record of events, perhaps the basis of a timeline.
4) Current Awareness and Alerts so articles come to you as they are
reported. News stories by email will become a large industry over the
next two years.
Information Theory
Just how inexpensive can news become? US$25 gets you access to past
translated news! VoaNews.com keeps a searchable directory back a month
for free. Many newspapers still have extensive archives of news, though
they hope to one-day charge for them. In a way, no-one is making money
from news. It is only worth the advertising revenue for distracting you
from reading the news - and that is falling too. With the freedom of
moving information through the internet, several free services will
send you email when an news article matches your interests (an Alert).
The future will see much more "compile your own" newspaper - especially
since it could conceivably be compiled at minimal to no expense
depending on the technology (frames anyone?) An intriguing lawsuit
recently stopped TotalNews (a news only search engine) from displaying
news articles in a frame.
If allowed to speculate for a moment, News-for-Pay may also become a
viable businesses. Perhaps this is just being cynical of journalistic
standards and the accepted standards of promotion. Perhaps it is also
recognition that Businesswire and PRWire are just two of several
newswires where you pay to have your news included. Obviously news
today is biased towards advertisers (through advertorials) and
promoters. Perhaps this will become automated some day - like Yahoo's
"we will look at your site right away for $200".
Naturally, the links and many of the forms to news resources discussed
here can be found at http://spireproject.com/newswire.htm and also our
All-in-one page: http://spireproject.com/spir.htm
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