Staying abreast of the latest news developments has never been more important.
Three free Web-based services are proving themselves to have great worth for journalists who don’t want to miss anything.The first, WorldFlash (www.worldflash.com) is a news ticker that crawls across the bottom of your computer screen just like the TV Networks keep running. The WorldFlash download, however, lets you run up to four constantly scrolling ticker-style windows. You can run stock prices and business news in one window, sports and entertainment in another, national and international news in a third window, and local news in the fourth.
Seven national news sources, including MSNBC, the Washington Post and The New York Times are available. International news sources from Australia to Israel to London and Russia are checked. Two dozen local newspapers around the nation are scanned, along with specialized business, science, health and technology news sources.
To start scrolling updated news headlines, you only need a connection to the Internet. While the program does work with dial-in modems, it really shines when you have an always-on cable or DSL connection. To read a news story or check e-mail, double click on the text, and a full screen version of the message or story opens.
The second service I can recommend is called DayPop (www.daypop.com), a current events search engine that indexes over 5000 news sites and weblogs on every day. The site searches on key words and you can set the currency, from four weeks old to up to three hours old.
For very fast and constantly updated news searches, it’s hard to beat NewsHub (www.newshub.com) . It updates every 15 minutes. News is organized by category and beat and is easily searchable.