Web Tips

I was a bit disappointed this week to learn that one of my favorite online services -- The New York Times' very handy News Tracker e-mails -- would soon become a subscription service. Fortunately, for those who don't think the price is worth it, there's a good free alternative.

E-mail services, like The Times', that track and send you links to stories that mention specific keywords, can be incredibly valuable to reporters. Just create alerts for any subject related to your beat and you'll get daily e-mails with the stories.

While The Times' has started charging, Yahoo continues offering its alerts free -- and Yahoo's might even be considered better.

Yahoo allows you to set up an unlimited number of alerts by keyword and sends links to any related stories from more than 50 publications -- everything from the Associated Press to USA Today. You can also get alerts with weather, stock quotes, and sports scores -- and have them sent to your mobile phone.

Yahoo's alerts even include some New York Times stories, since some are published on Yahoo as part of their partnership, so you can get those sent to you without having to pay for the Times' service.

For those who want e-mails tracking any New York Times stories of interest, the new subscription service is worth considering. It's pretty cheap, at just $19.95 a year (that's an introductory rate so it may go up), and they're throwing in a $10 gift certificate to the NYT store.

The new service also increases the number of topics you can track from three to 10 and gives subscribers a 90-day archive of articles matching your topic selection (The Times usually charges for archived content). Plus, if you want to keep receiving the Times' Breaking News Alerts you'll have to pay, as they're now only available to News Tracker subscribers (an odd decision, as many other sites offer free breaking news alerts).

Here is some more information about the new service: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/newstrackerfaq.html

For those interested in financial data, two other sites that offer free story tracking alerts are forbes.com and marketwatch.com.

Of course, you can also get Forbes content via Yahoo Alerts. And Reuters stories, and U.S. News & World Report, and The Financial Times, and ....